


Wondrous Lands and Oceans

by Lomonaaeren



Series: Hurricane [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Exploration, Fantasy, Gen, M/M, Other Worlds, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-27
Updated: 2014-07-27
Packaged: 2018-02-10 16:33:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 31
Words: 122,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2032041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The emigration to the wild magic world of Hurricane is complete, but not the settling-in process. Harry and Draco struggle to solidify both their own bond and their bonds with their family and allies—while setting out on journeys of exploration that prove there is more to Hurricane than storms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Choices and Obligations

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sequel to Reap the Hurricane; read that first.

Harry’s head ached. He leaned towards the fire and massaged his brow, grimacing when his fingers caught in and scratched at the scar. Sometimes he forgot it was there until he touched it, and then he would grow irritated with it all over again.  
  
He would have got up and left the fire, but Draco’s hand was on his knee to stop him. Harry glanced at him, and Draco reached over, took his hand, and pulled it away from his scar with neat, precise movements. Then he reached behind himself—sending far too many thoughts for comfort springing and spinning through Harry’s mind—and came out with a handful of green, cool salve.  
  
Harry blinked. “I thought all of that was gone,” he muttered. They had brought supplies from the wizarding world, but this had gone the fastest, an ointment that Angelina knew how to make as an apprentice Healer which would soothe cuts and scratches.  
  
“I hoarded some,” Draco replied, and pulled back Harry’s fringe, half-hauling his head to the side, tracing his fingers over the lightning bolt line. Harry sighed as the salve sank in and began to soothe the irritation of his scar along with the sensation of a brain bombarded by too many flying images.  
  
 _ _Images sent telepathically at me by a herd of magical goats, no less.__  
  
But the mummid weren’t really goats, and it had taken Harry and Draco hours to explain to them what a predatory bird hatchling was doing in the humans’ camp, and why they thought they could tame the bird to fly for and with them, hunting what they told it to hunt, instead of slaughtering the mummid herds the way that any other bird would. Flight, the entity these mummid made up, had had to learn the concept of domestication, and then hear about the way Ginny had fed her blood to the bird, and then make out that Harry and Draco—the ones bonded by wild magic, the only human pair that the mummid thought of as real, sentient people because they were together instead of individuals—hadn’t been changed by the proximity of the bird the way that a herd would be changed and made to scatter when their natural enemies came near.  
  
It had taken most of the afternoon. Hence the headache, and the exhaustion that tugged dully at Harry’s muscles when he shifted.   
  
Hence Draco’s hand on his forehead.  
  
 _ _No, actually,__ Harry thought, blinking and opening his eyes.  _ _Why are you bothering being gentle?__  
  
“Because I can be,” said Draco, the same way, his hooked thoughts informed Harry, that he was speaking aloud because he could. “This is my  _ _choice.__ Did you think that someone bonded to you the way I was would always be harsh?” He reached out and rested his salve-covered hand on the leg of Harry’s trousers. Harry rolled his eyes at him, hissed, and summoned a breeze to brush over his knee and dry the salve to particles it could blow away.   
  
“Yes,” Harry said. “Because it’s you.”  
  
Draco shook his head. His face was narrow, intent in a way that Harry hadn’t seen it in days. Most of the time, Draco was so content with the way their bond was going and the way that Harry gave in to him that he seemed to have decided he might as well be complacent.  
  
 _ _I’m not giving in to him anymore. That must be the change.__  
  
“It’s rather stupid,” Draco said, hooking his hands under his knees and cocking his head to the side. “To think as if I couldn’t access your every thought, touch your every impulse. You could ask me the answers to your questions if you wanted to know them. No, instead you babble to yourself as if nothing mattered but the responses your broken brain comes up with.”  
  
Harry felt his winds rise, swirling around his shoulders and stirring his hair, in response to the flat arrogance of that pronouncement. Draco spread his hands, and Harry felt the invisible claws on the ends of his hands—and elsewhere, since Draco could place weapons in any spot he needed them—stir and unfold.  
  
“I don’t  _ _need__ to be harsh,” Draco said, his voice clicking like the tumble of river-stones. “I don’t need to act as though our history before we came to Hurricane is the only thing that matters and the only bond connecting us. I can. We have the choice. Everyone has the choice, Harry. You can change the way that you act around me and the way you act around the Weasleys.” He glanced across the fire, to the area where Harry’s family sat, leaving more than enough room for Harry and Draco to isolate themselves. “But you act as though you don’t want to, as though you want to go on being my enemy and their martyred leader forever.”  
  
Harry stiffened.  _ _You know that that isn’t the case. You read that in my mind. I thought you finally believed me when I said that I had no desire to abandon you—__  
  
“I do,” Draco said, his voice all snap and bristle under the placid surface. “But you should accept that I can change, too. It’s easier that way.”  
  
Harry nodded slowly. “Sorry,” he said aloud. He stood up, bracing himself for something that was a lot harder than sitting by the fire and speaking with Draco: facing the Weasleys and explaining what had happened with Primrose, and the rabbit-creatures she had shown them, and the mummid.  
  
Draco stood up at his side, and walked with him. Harry realized they were breathing in unison and shook his head in irritation.  
  
 _ _We don’t have to,__ Draco whispered.  _ _But we can if we want to, and there’s really no reason that we need to stop.__  
  
Harry paused. When he thought about it that way, in terms of choices rather than obligations, then things made a lot more sense. He wasn’t abandoning a luxurious indulgence with Draco and trying to pay attention to other people again; he was choosing to talk to the Weasleys more so that the camp would be more comfortable with them. Or else he wasn’t clinging to his family because they were comfortable and turning his back on Draco because their bond made him uncomfortable; he was choosing to think and talk to him in a new way because that would allow them to be together in new ways.  
  
 _ _Yes,__ Draco said, and his fingers brushed the back of Harry’s hand, at the same time as invisible claws caressed Harry’s nape under his hairline.  _ _That’s exactly it.__  
  
Armed with pleasure and the discovery that he really liked it when Draco touched him that way, Harry went forth to battle.  
  
*  
  
 _ _Look at them. The lot of them. Huddling. Dreading.__  
  
To Draco, the clearest sign that something needed to change was that no one had tried to talk to him and Potter when they came back to camp, despite the hours they’d been gone speaking to the mummid. They had held back, and watched, and waited. If they had questions, not even Granger had dared ask them.  
  
Draco could have put up with respect, or earned fear. This was mindless caution, and resentment of the fact that he was going to be with their precious Potter. Even speaking to Harry alone was no longer possible, not when their thoughts flowed back and forth and were shared.  
  
Things had to change.  
  
But Draco would be damned if he made many changes that he didn’t want to. He might have to stifle some of his impulses, like the ones that made him want to haul Harry away from the Weasley girl or smack Granger across the mouth when her voice began to whine. He would live with the Weasleys.  
  
He wouldn’t let Harry deform himself or their bond or Draco in order to do it, though.  
  
Harry halted in front of the Weasleys and watched them with soft eyes that Draco couldn’t understand. What did they have to offer him that Draco couldn’t? Yes, he had dated the Weasley girl at one point, but despite the way she looked at him, Draco had sensed no real desire in Harry to go back to her. He had been the first one to fuck Harry, the first one to touch him in any deep, intimate way.  
  
 _I wish you would stop thinking like that._  
  
Draco sent back a quick jab of thought that raced into the center of Harry’s mind and showed Harry what he could do with his prudish impulses.  
  
Harry returned a whirlwind that centered on the thought of the way he would get hard if Draco kept thinking about fucking him. It had nothing to do with prudishness.  
  
Draco laughed silently, and spoke to the Weasleys on the strength of that cresting tide. If Harry could admit that Draco made him hard with random words, then Draco could admit that living with Harry’s chosen family in the camp wasn’t horrible. “So. The mummid did question us about the bird. We reassured them that we were still their allies and that the bird wouldn’t attack and eat them.”  
  
“You couldn’t promise them that.” It was the Ministry lackey, the one who was sometimes on their side and sometimes not. Incredible as it seemed, Draco thought, he seemed to try and follow the rules of logic. Useless in the wizarding world, worse than useless on a world like Hurricane. “The bird might escape from our control and fly over them. It might require meat as it grows. You can’t—”  
  
“Then we lied to them,” Draco said impatiently. “The same way that your brother lied to us when he told us that he was in control now.” He watched the werewolf stretch from the corner of his eye, and snapped out invisible, cutting claws from his shoulder blades, which would act as a kind of armor if the werewolf came at him from behind. “None of us can  _know_ what will happen in the future. But we can try to predict it.”  
  
The lackey paused, his face a little less flushed than some of the others’ would become. Draco could approve of a Weasley who didn’t always turn perfect Weasley red. “Right,” he said at last. “I didn’t think of that. Thanks.”  
  
 _He means it?_ Draco sent to Harry, and Harry laughed and caught the thought and sent it back to him without the inflection of a question.   
  
Apparently so.  
  
Draco tilted his head, and Harry anticipated what he would say next and ceded the privilege of speaking the news to him. Draco cleared his throat, less because he needed to than because it meant all their attention was focused on him, hostile as that attention could sometimes be. “Primrose has left the camp. She couldn’t stand being near the bird. But before she left, she showed us a source of meat.”  
  
The werewolf leaped up. The girl Weasley, who sat with her arm over the back of the hatchling cuddled against her, lifted her face, and a fragile light seemed to shine on it from somewhere. Draco wondered if she had fed the bird on her blood again, if Transfigured meat had proved insufficient.  
  
“Where?” the werewolf demanded.  
  
“Warrens,” Draco said. Keep it simple, and they would have to less to misunderstand and therefore less to blame him for. “The creatures are like rabbits, except that they can vanish away from the touch of a hand. Thin to shadow, was the way that Primrose put it. She had captured several of them and killed them and dried the meat. She told us how she did it, too. And she tested the meat, and found it safe.”  
  
“We need to go and find some of them.” The werewolf was making random little motions with his hands as if he and not Draco was the one with claws. “Now.”  
  
“Primrose only saw them in the daytime,” Draco said, glad that he had foreseen this objection and had the right tone of indifference in his voice. He stood still and watched the werewolf, who sat down again after a moment. “But she showed us where one of the warrens was. Hard to find in the long grass, but we can find the way back to this one.”  
  
He felt the slight push of a question from Harry, and pushed right back. Yes, he was sure that Harry, at least, could track down where they had been with a wind, and make sure that they wouldn’t lose the location.  
  
Harry sat there radiating strange black-red clouds of shock that Draco would actually praise him and his wind magic for something. Since that shock took a lot of deliberate ignoring of the past, Draco ignored him right back.  
  
“This could be the end of most of our food problems,” Granger said, closing her eyes as if she was the only one the problem had overwhelmed. “If we had a regular source of meat—and fur?” She opened her eyes and looked at Draco. “Did Primrose say anything about how soft the skin is?”  
  
Draco shook his head. “She created a glamour of one for us, and we saw the meat. We didn’t see any of them alive.”  
  
“I’ll make sure that we do,” Granger said, and stood up, and wandered off into the night. Draco watched her go for a moment, wondering if she had heard what he said about the warren not being active in darkness. Then he shrugged. Knowing her, she had decided to plan an elaborate strategy that would lead to the capture of the rabbit-creatures, somehow.  
  
“Primrose wouldn’t stay?” That was the Weasel mother, and she was so clearly asking Harry that Draco faded back behind him and let him take over. Besides, so much interaction with people who wanted to destroy him had exhausted him. From here, he could touch Harry’s back and admire his arse as he needed to, to relieve his shattered feelings.  
  
Harry gave a push of wind that nearly knocked Draco off his feet, but answered the woman. “No. We tried to reason with her, and point out that her chances of survival on her own aren’t nearly as good as if she stayed with us. But she was too frightened of the bird. At least…at least, this way, there’s a good chance that she  _can_ live, if she knows those spells that purify water and food.”  
  
“I don’t know the specific ones that the Ministry used, but I can work out what some of them must have been,” the Healer said, sitting up and drawing her wand down her wrist as though writing the incantation in her dark skin. “If you give me some time.”  
  
Harry smiled at her, and the Healer sat up some more and took in a deep breath. All of them responded that way when he gave them attention, Draco thought. He thought he saw how the unhealthy dynamic between Harry and the Weasels had endured for so long. It was hard not to feel that he  _should_  give them that attention, when they hung so desperately on it. Harry would think that a little attention was all right, and then a little more.   
  
And before long, you ended up with a camp where no one led themselves, where they looked to their savior the way they always had during the war, and where the savior worried constantly about what effect his actions had on other people.  
  
 _I’m here now, to help you judge,_ Draco thought to Harry, stroking his shirt gently enough that it didn’t tear under his claws.  
  
 _Thank Merlin for that._  
  
Not even Draco’s insight into Harry’s emotions could tell him, for certain, whether that last sentence was sarcastic or not.  
  
*  
  
Harry leaned against the door of their house and sighed. The conversations with the Weasleys had gone on until Hurricane’s three small dots of moons had risen and then nearly set, and his legs trembled now. He wanted nothing more than to go in and flop down on a pallet, or even a dirt floor, and simply sleep.  
  
But there was a problem standing in his way.  
  
Andromeda.  
  
She hadn’t been sitting with the others beside the fire, which Harry hadn’t thought much of at the time. He had assumed that Teddy was sleepy and she was staying in the house with him. Or else that she was tired and wanted time to herself. Andromeda still found the world too much for her in random flashes, which, considering how many people she had lost in the war, wasn’t surprising.  
  
Her face was pale the way it got when the world was too much for her, but she didn’t move out of the way, and Harry knew he wasn’t the reason. The reason stood behind him with invisible claws coming out of his hair and watched with an unmoving expression of patient interest.  
  
“Andromeda, please,” Harry said quietly. “I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”  
  
“You can do that,” Andromeda said, and smiled at him for a moment before she turned back to Draco. “Without him.”  
  
Draco didn’t say anything. Harry wondered whether to be grateful for the forbearance or not. He knew that quality of silence had a tendency to explode.  
  
“I don’t think he’ll hurt Teddy,” Harry said, promptly approaching what he thought would be the greatest source of her objections. Andromeda stared at him, and Harry snorted a little. Sometimes, people reacted to the direct approach as though he was hurting them. He didn’t understand why. He wished more people had used it around him, beginning with Dumbledore. “I’ve trusted him with his care several times. And you and Teddy are the only family that Draco has here.”  
  
Draco ran his claws lightly over Harry’s shirt again, not tearing the seams.  
  
“It has nothing to do with Teddy,” Andromeda said. “It has to do with you.”  
  
“We can promise not to have sex in the house, if it bothers you,” Harry said harshly. He would have added that Draco preferred to fuck under the open sky, anyway, but there was a limit to how far he wanted to push Andromeda right now.  
  
 _You’ve taken over the burdens,_ Draco said into his mind, a murmur like a distant brook.  _You’ve taken care of Teddy most of the time. You were the one who arranged the emigration. She didn’t have to make her own decisions. She’s inexperienced at it, I would imagine, since my uncle and my cousin died. That’s what this is about. She thinks that she’s losing you to me, and she wants to keep us apart in at least one place._  
  
Harry sent back amazement at the spectacular insight, and Draco bit the back of his neck in response. Harry wondered if Andromeda had seen that, because she took in a breath and shook her head.  
  
“You can’t sleep here,” she said. “Not together.”  
  
“I can promise that sleeping is all we’re doing,” Harry said. His body ached and pounded and hurt. Political negotiation had always taken more time and toil and resources from him than actual battle.  
  
Draco snapped his fingers, but he would have to live with it. Harry had had sex with him just a few nights ago. They could go somewhere and fuck in the morning, but right now, getting into the house and sleeping was the most important thing on Harry’s mind.  
  
Surprisingly enough, Draco stepped away from him. Harry wondered if it was the exhaustion that had convinced him—exhaustion he would be able to sense in his own muscles—or the look on Andromeda’s face.  
  
“I don’t care,” Andromeda said quietly, her breath puffing out so forcefully that Harry took a step back. “This stops now. You are not going to be here, under the same roof as Teddy. He doesn’t deserve to see you  _with_ someone who was on the opposite side of the war that cost him his parents.”  
  
 _And I don’t want to see it, either._ Harry didn’t have to think hard to know what the conclusion to Andromeda’s sentence would have been.  
  
Harry closed his eyes for a minute. He had wanted to rest beside Teddy, the godson he loved, the godson he had given up so much in the wizarding world for, the little boy he had taken to Hurricane because he thought a wild, dangerous magical world would be better to grow up in than the corrupted place the wizarding world had become.  
  
But Teddy was okay, and he would be all right without Harry for one night.   
  
“Come on, Draco,” he said, and turned his back on Andromeda, because he might punch her or rage at her if he continued standing there. “Let’s go somewhere else. We’ve slept under the open sky before.”  
  
There was a long, crystalline moment that seemed to fill the air between them with starlight. Then Draco was walking beside him, one hand on Harry’s hip, and Andromeda was catching her breath behind them.  
  
“Should I just tell Teddy that you aren’t coming back, then?” Andromeda’s voice wavered and broke like splashed water.  
  
Harry rubbed his forehead. Fuck, he didn’t want to  _deal_ with this. He thought he’d defused the confrontation, and Andromeda leaped straight into another one.  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, staring at the darkening downs. Hurricane’s long twilight had finally faded, and the moons were falling, too. Darkness sounded wonderful, darkness he could just bury himself and  _sleep_ in, and people would quit trying to wake him up and ask him questions. “I’m just doing one thing you wanted. It doesn’t mean I’ll never see Teddy again. I’ll see him, and you, in the morning.”  
  
He walked away, although given the winds swirling around him, he could have flown. But with his luck, the blast of rage would have only lasted long enough to raise him to an impressive height, and then his fatigue would have taken over again and dashed him to the ground. Harry calmed the wind and walked until he thought they were in the middle of a sheltered hollow that would be out of sight of the camp.  
  
Only when he lay down did he realize Draco was standing over him and staring at him.  
  
“What?” Harry asked wearily, propping himself up on his elbow. “Do you think I should have forced the issue?” He could have read the answer out of Draco’s head if he concentrated, but his own head was  _pounding,_ and frankly, he just wanted a straight response from Draco’s words for once. A straight response from anyone would be nice.  
  
*  
  
Draco had to say the words. Harry was too far gone into a ringing darkness that propelled gong-like echoes through Draco’s mind.  
  
“You chose me,” Draco whispered. “Over her.”  
  
Harry gave a little shudder-shiver from head to toe. “Not over Teddy.”  
  
“You chose me over pleasing them,” Draco said, and knelt down in front of Harry, splaying his fingers over Harry’s nose and forehead. Harry blinked back at him, and rubbed his scar. “You didn’t even think about acceding to what she wanted and telling me to stay outside.”  
  
“I couldn’t do that,” Harry said.  
  
“Because of your nobility?” All of Draco’s feelings trembled in suspension, between the anger they would tumble into if that was the truth and the wonder that he would feel if something else was.  
  
“Because I want you with me,” Harry said, and rolled over and buried his face in the grass as if that would shut out the world.  
  
It was up to Draco to conjure pillows, to lift Harry’s head so he could put his face on one, and then to Summon a blanket that draped over them. Draco lay down with his hand on Harry’s shoulder and his head on the pillow beside him and listened to his heartbeat.  
  
 _He chose me. He did._  
  
Yes, it was the wonder.


	2. Like Rabbits

Harry hunched forwards and waited there for a moment with his hands on his knees. He could smell the rabbits that waited ahead of them (Harry was just going to call them “rabbits” until someone else came up with a name that stuck), because the wind was carrying their scents to him. And it was a strong, gamy scent, as though they pissed meat as well as being made of it.  
  
 _Let’s not tell Bill, or he’ll want to eat the piss, too._  
  
Draco’s laughter scraped up and down his brain like someone inexpertly playing piano keys. Harry shook his head a little, and Draco’s laughter calmed at once, as if he assumed that the headshake expressed deeper irritation than it did.  
  
 _I don’t think that,_ Draco snarled back.  _I know what you’re thinking, I can tell._  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. This could turn into one of their endless and needless looping conversations if they weren’t careful, with Draco insisting that he knew what all of Harry’s emotions were and Harry pointing out that he didn’t  _act_ as if he did. They were here for something else.  _Ready?_  
  
Draco sent back wordless waiting, the cramp of his legs and the way the grasses waved around him. His claws gleamed at the ends of his fingers, and he had arrows waiting to be strung in his mind.  
  
Harry nodded, and then stood up and spread his arms.  
  
The winds whistled forth from behind him, far lower than they would normally be on Hurricane, and swept the grasses thick with bristling seeds aside. Harry felt his hair stick to his cheeks and his eyes tear, but he had prepared for that and kept his gaze fixed ahead, watching the space between the ground and the middle of the grass stalks.  
  
And out of them came the rabbits, springing and thinning as they flew, running from the disturbed grasses back home.  
  
 _Now_ , Harry chanted, and blew six rabbits off-course with a breeze, just as they started to solidify back into a cloud-like shape. The rabbits made a single, shrill noise that went into Harry’s ear like a needle, and Harry winced. Primrose hadn’t mentioned that, maybe because she had killed them before they could do it.   
  
Draco’s arrow flew overhead; Harry felt the catch and pull of his muscles as he released, and, more than that, the catch and pull of his magic. The tumbling rabbits rose and fell as Harry’s wind positioned them. Their magic never seemed to change them again; maybe they had to be moving before they could use it. Harry caught his breath.  
  
The arrow slammed home, and the rabbits sagged, each one dropping to the ground with an entrance wound on the left flank and an exit wound on the right.  
  
Harry whistled softly and knelt down, examining the blood clotting on the ground for a moment. Then he looked up and nodded. “Dead,” he said aloud. No need to preserve silence now, when the other rabbits would have fled.  
  
Draco loped through the grass to find him, casually cutting off the tops of the blades that might have interfered with his progress. Harry raised his eyebrows at him. They didn’t want to denude the place, or the rabbits might abandon the warren and move elsewhere.  
  
Draco ignored that, though his shoulder did knock Harry’s heavily as he knelt down beside him and looked at their first kill. “They  _are_ as fat as Primrose said,” he murmured eventually. “As fat as pigeons. We can only hope that the flesh is as rich, I suppose.” He stirred and glanced at Harry. “You know that some of them are going to want to eat it cooked, instead of drying it in the sun the way Primrose showed us.”  
  
Harry nodded back. He almost felt as though he wanted to eat it that way himself. He had never cared that much about different kinds of food, except sweets, which he got so rarely on Privet Drive; food was food, and he either starved or drowned in all sorts of good things, no room in between. But this way…  
  
He floated the small corpses into the air, and turned them over so that Draco could see the wounds for himself. Draco fanned out his fingers, and mimed dipping claws into the holes, so that more blood began to flow.  
  
“Let’s get them back, then, instead of drooling over them,” Draco said into the great golden silence.  
  
Harry nodded, draped the corpses over his shoulders, and took a step forwards.  
  
“Why walk when you can fly?” Draco asked from behind him.  
  
Harry blinked back at him. “You mean fly in on the winds,” he said, when Draco carried on staring at him.  
  
 _This is the kind of thing that means you should practice reading my mind, instead of pretending that you can’t,_ Draco said, and rolled his eyes. “Yes, I mean that,” he said aloud. “We’ve kept secrets from them for no good reason, it seems to me now. They can’t join us without brooms in the sky unless they develop the wild magic themselves. Why hide it?”  
  
Harry hesitated. Then he nodded. He and Draco had kept to themselves more than they should, and that had probably given the Weasleys more reason to distrust them. He shouldn’t discourage any attempts that Draco made to give them more in common with other people who, after all, they would depend on for survival.  
  
Draco rolled his eyes again. “You don’t need to think about me in that condescending fashion, either. I can hear you. You can hear me. We ought to be functioning even better as a team than we do.”  
  
Harry heaved the rabbit in silent answer. Draco snorted. “And? That’s something we’ve practiced in the past, when we fought the bird. Why don’t we try something new? Fly into camp, and do it together. And then you concentrate on reading my mind for the rest of the day, trying to anticipate what I’ll do. Instead of the other way around, for once,” he added, and his voice had turned as savage as iron.  
  
Harry winced, and nodded. It wasn’t fair to make him do all the work.  
  
 _Still condescending. But better._  
  
Harry gritted his teeth, and silently summoned the wind. It blew his hair back and made his shoulders quiver as if they bore wings. Harry smiled in spite of himself. The wind made him happier than anything.  
  
 _A prominence I may hope to challenge, one day._  
  
Harry reached back, instinctively caught the hand that Draco didn’t have claws on at the moment, and then let his feet lift from the ground. He was glad that Draco had insisted they both rest yesterday, instead of going out to hunt at once. He wouldn’t have had the magic to fly like this otherwise.  
  
And that would be a pity, he thought, as he lifted into the air, and Draco flew behind him. He could use wind to cradle them both. Draco did insist on taking control in his own way, by slicing some of the winds into breezes and letting the currents catch him in a timed fall, but that was the way he was. Harry wouldn’t change him.  
  
 _You are much more agreeable when you fly. I must remember that._  
  
Harry held his arms out in front of him and used his wrists to spin himself, while behind him Draco flew, too, but lower. Yes, Draco was right. From the beginning of his time in the wizarding world, flying had been the thing that could never harm him. He was safer on a broom—and now, in the arms of his winds—than he was on the ground, or in the Ministry, or among other people.  
  
 _Especially in the Ministry._  
  
And, for at least the short space of time it took the wind to cross the land between the warren and the camp, he gave himself up to the sky.  
  
*  
  
Draco watched Harry in silence. His head was held between his arms, which sleeked the way. His body dived and rose and dipped, falcon-like. His eyes would be bright and on fire, although Draco couldn’t see them from this angle.  
  
Perhaps he should encourage Harry to fly every day.  
  
And perhaps he should encourage Harry to use the wind so that  _he_ could fly every day.  
  
It was exhilarating, in the same way that hunting the rabbits was, to shift and balance between one choice and another, one wind and another, falling and then being snatched up a new gale that he would cut, to feel the currents in his hair and on his skin and brushing past his ears, to breathe deeply and fill his lungs with the coolness. Harry wouldn’t let him fall, that was the working in partnership, and in the meantime Draco could use his weapons and exercise his own independence.  
  
 _Too bad that that doesn’t work the rest of the time._  
  
Formless annoyance roiled at him from Harry’s direction, but faded in the next rush of the wind. Draco smiled thinly at Harry’s back, and then braced his legs despite himself as the wild magic snatched him up to Harry’s level. He had grown so used to controlling his own weapons that he forgot, sometimes, how disorienting it was to be subjected to someone else’s.  
  
 _Watch out for fear in the others when they see us arrive this way. Watch their faces. We should show them what we can do, but be ready to soothe their reactions._  
  
Harry was silent for a moment, while the grass rolled under them and the small stream that trickled down from the hills appeared. Then he said,  _That is a change. Yes, I’m going to watch._  
  
Draco wanted to catch his breath, wanted to say something, but they looped and fell and soared, and before he had the chance to cut another wind and stand forth on his own, Harry dropped them both into the grass in front of Granger’s greenhouse.  
  
For once, Granger wasn’t there, and neither were the Ministry lackey, or the Dragon Keeper, who was probably spending time with his younger sister and the bird. Instead, the Weasley patriarch and the original Weasel straightened up from weeding and stared at them with dangling jaws.  
  
Harry bowed his head and turned to watch Draco. Then he smiled and said, “Surprise. We can fly.”  
  
The patriarch choked and said nothing. Weasel smiled slowly back at Harry, didn’t look at Draco, and whispered, “That was the way that you faced the bird, then. Not so much on brooms as on the wind.”  
  
Harry nodded. His eyes were bright as he laid the bloody rabbits in the middle of the grass, and the patriarch stepped forwards and said, “Did you see any more of them? The warren was where you thought it was? How long do you think we need to cook these before they’re ready?”  
  
Harry smiled at him in turn, and Draco half-relaxed as he realized that Harry associated the stream of random and impertinent questions with the man’s interest in Muggle objects. Better to be interested in the animals associated with one’s survival than in Muggle objects, Draco had to admit, if one must let one’s thoughts leap about like that.  
  
“We saw others, but these were the only ones we killed,” Harry said. “I blew them into the air from their grip on a stalk, and Draco stabbed them.” He invited Draco into the conversation with a little tip of his chin.  
  
“We can try cooking them,” Draco said. “But I think we should dry at least half the meat in the way that Primrose showed us. We don’t know anything about roasting the meat or how safe it will be to eat that way. Primrose didn’t try it.”  _Probably because someone would have seen her fire and then she couldn’t keep her secret._  
  
Harry nodded back, and didn’t set up his usual defense of Primrose and what she’d taught them. He might have realized by now that it didn’t matter, or that he wouldn’t persuade Draco any way he tried it. Draco relaxed a little.  
  
The patriarch crouched down beside the rabbits and examined the wounds in the sides, exclaiming softly. Then he looked up. “Should we make—we should make this a celebration,” he said, as if he had just remembered that he didn’t have a reason to defer to Draco, or at least thought he didn’t. “We’ve had precious little to celebrate since we came here.”  
  
Draco stifled the snort he wanted to give. They didn’t count a successful escape from the Ministry and surviving for a couple of months on a planet full of wild magic that wanted them dead as a triumph?  
  
 _It’s hard to celebrate that,_ Harry’s mind murmured back.  _It takes a great event to serve as a symbol._  
  
Draco twitched his head in return. He did understand that, but it would never stop being ridiculous to him nonetheless.  
  
“I think we should,” Harry said, and smiled at the original Weasel. “Ron can do that trick with fire that he learned just before we left, can’t he, Ron?”  
  
The Weasel’s face turned so red that Draco was surprised he didn’t faint, with all the blood in his body rushing to one place like that. “ _Harry_ ,” he hissed. “You said you weren’t going to tell anyone about that.”  
  
Harry smiled. “It would be hard to forget about it when Hermione saw it, and Andromeda, and George, and—”  
  
“I  _knew_ I shouldn’t have let you invite everyone over for dinner that night,” the Weasel said darkly, and stamped off muttering. But from the lines of his back, or the way that Harry interpreted the lines of his back, he didn’t mind.  
  
 _If I’d insulted one of my friends like that, there would be blood to pay,_ Draco told Harry.  
  
Harry shrugged and picked up the rabbits again, while aloud he planned the celebration for that night with the patriarch.  _Your friends and mine are different. That’s not a revelation._  
  
It wasn’t, and Draco was displeased with himself for thinking so. He continued frowning while he and Harry went to Transfigure grass into wood for the fire that night—or rather, they went so that Harry could blow the grass together and Draco could cast the spells that would complete the Transfiguration. Harry had all but abandoned his wand for his winds since they came to Hurricane.  
  
*  
  
The fire was large, and the laughter was loud, and if they didn’t have all  _that_ much to celebrate, someone watching from outside wouldn’t think of it that way, Harry thought, shading his eyes so that he could see some of the faces looming as shadows past the flames.  
  
The rabbits had roasted above the fire while Hermione cast every spell she could think of on them. She ended by stepping away, shaking her head, and admitting that she should have studied more spells like that before they left.  
  
Harry could feel Draco agreeing with her in the back of his head, but he ignored that. The Ministry had discovered the worlds quickly; they had hustled the emigrants through the gates into them just as quickly. They hadn’t left much time for packing, or saying farewell, or making up their minds for more than the most essential survival skills. None of them had done everything they should have, because they hadn’t had  _time._  
  
Hermione looked a little better after he said that, and they broke the rabbits up into small pieces and served them slowly, the largest pieces to Bill and Draco, seasoning the meal with sweet grass seeds, a few of the tougher and weedier plants from Hermione’s greenhouses, a sort of bread that Molly had begun to bake and press from the grasses, and a bowl of—  
  
Harry stared at the white liquid in the bowl in front of him, then stared at Hermione. “This isn’t milk, is it?” he asked. “I didn’t think we had cows yet.”  
  
Hermione grinned. “Not cows,” she said, and turned and gestured with her hand at Ginny.   
  
Ginny stood up, her face almost the same color as her hair. Draco muttered something uncomplimentary, but everything Draco said about Ginny was uncomplimentary, and Harry had figured out that he would have to live with it. He couldn’t force Draco to change everything about himself, only what would get them in trouble or make a difference in how easily they could live with his family.  
  
 _They’re still my family. I was in danger of forgetting that at first, I was so obsessed with Draco._  
  
Draco shot spikes of disgust and resentment at him. Harry reached out and silently stroked his thoughts in apology. The obsession had been mutual, and maybe because he’d been a virgin until Draco had fucked him, he’d reacted  _like_ a virgin. Thinking about it all the time, attributing everything to it, convinced that it had changed him as a person. When, really, it could only change him as far as he let it.  
  
Draco subsided in something like confusion, and Ginny coughed. “The bird is too small to fly yet,” she said. “But I took a broom and went east, beyond the gate.”  
  
Harry smiled at her. West lay the camp that Primrose and her people had lived in, but which the bird had destroyed; Primrose had been the sole survivor. North was the direction the heaviest storms seemed to come from. South was the direction the mummidade seemed to favor, and so far they hadn’t yet dared to travel far there.  
  
But east beyond the gate was a good idea. The gate had opened in the middle of nowhere; there was no reason not to look beyond it, behind it, and see what lay there.  
  
 _You can stop admiring her at any time.  
  
I would admire you in the same way if you’d had the same idea, _Harry said, without turning to look at Draco.  _It’s the cleverness of the idea that catches at me, not the person who came up with it._  
  
Draco caught his breath, and hushed. Ginny was continuing, and Harry listened to the trembles and breaks in the back of her voice. She had never sounded like this back in the wizarding world. Was Hurricane getting to her more than he had realized, giving her chances to doubt herself? Being rescued by Draco and Harry the first time she did some serious flying couldn’t have helped.  
  
 _Perhaps a reason that she took the broom out this time,_ Draco said, and he hammered the words into Harry’s skull so hard that Harry couldn’t help but hear them.  
  
He needed to hear them, he realized a moment later, flushing. Yes, Ginny would want to make up for what she had seen as a failure, especially since she had confessed to him once that she really had nothing to contribute to the camp other than flying. If she lost out once, if she couldn’t help hunt the bird that Harry and Draco had killed and couldn’t ride the one she was rearing yet, she would do this.  
  
 _Sometimes, you are more than oblivious,_ Draco hissed.  _I begin to wonder how they survived for so long with you as a leader, when you don’t think about the psychology of the people who follow you._  Harry hunched his shoulders and said nothing.  
  
Ginny said, “The plains that lie in that direction start sloping downwards soon, although I don’t know why, there’s no mountains there. I rose higher, because I thought there might be a lake in that direction. And—there’s something else.” She shivered and held out her hands as though she was conjuring the sight up between them for others to admire. “I saw blue, and when I flew there, I saw the sea.”  
  
Harry half-closed his eyes. For some reason, he’d thought of Teddy growing up without seeing oceans, and now here they were.  
  
Draco was silent, other than a hand in the middle of Harry’s back.  
  
Ginny nodded at the bowls of milk Hermione had given them. “I landed on the shore and walked along it. I wanted to fly over it, but edible plants are more important. I found trees that are about three times the size of any coconut trees back on Earth, but they have fruit that looked the same.”  
  
“And she tried the milk with all the spells she could think of, and here it is,” Hermione broke in, gesturing at the bowls in turn.  
  
Ginny raised an eyebrow. Harry grinned as Hermione blushed. She’d probably just wanted to reassure everyone that it was safe to drink it, but she  _had_ stolen a bit of Ginny’s thunder.  
  
Draco picked up his bowl of milk and saluted Ginny with it. “To a true pioneer and explorer,” he said, and tilted his head back to sling the milk down his throat.  
  
Harry stared at him some more. Draco acted as though nothing was less important to him in life than noticing Harry’s stare, instead working his throat around the milk and swallowing. Then he put the bowl down and bowed to Ginny. “A good addition to our diet,” he said. Harry checked his face, but could find nothing in his expression that suggested he was lying.  
  
 _You can read my mind,_ Draco said, all subtly drawled words and slow pressure of the thoughts in his head that felt as though they would crush Harry with their weight.  _Why in the world are you looking at my face?  
  
I like to, _Harry said, with more truth than he wanted, and he felt himself blush as he picked up his bowl. But everyone was looking at Draco and Ginny and the empty bowl, as if waiting for him to fall down frothing, and no one paid attention to him. Harry was glad. Besides the blush, his hands were shaking.  
  
Draco didn’t say anything, but then again, the emotions that came from his mind at the moment felt just as still and quiet as the ones in Harry’s. So Harry swallowed a portion of the milk, and found that Draco wasn’t joking. It could stand to be either colder or warmer; at the moment, it was tepid, and Harry had never enjoyed drinking any liquid like that. But it rolled and dripped in his mouth like real milk, and the taste was piercingly sweet. There were no lumps floating in it, either, the way he had been afraid there would be from the effort Draco seemed to need to swallow it.  
  
When he put down the bowl, he joined in the applause. By now, Ginny was making ironic little bows in all directions, but the one she made to Harry was accompanied by a faint, sweet smile.  
  
Draco’s hand immediately locked into place on his back. Harry rolled his eyes.  _I told you, she’s not interested in me. And even if she was, I’m not interested in her.  
  
See that it stays that way._ Draco’s fingers squeezed and withdrew.  
  
Harry watched Draco’s profile for a moment, shining in the firelight and with his teeth biting firmly on his lip as though he were repressing all sorts of words. Then he turned back to the conversation about Ginny, and her flight, and the ocean.  
  
Because, after all, wasn’t  _this_ what Andromeda was implicitly accusing him of? Paying too much attention to his own small corner of the world, which was the bond and the various parts of it, and not enough to the larger conversation and the world around him?   
  
And this was exciting, something that might genuinely change the way they lived on Hurricane, instead of yet another argument about Bill being a werewolf or whether they should devote their slender resources to raising more Earth plants or trying to raise animals. And if they had water, they could purify it of salt; Angelina had said the charms to do that were relatively simple.  
  
Harry breathed out weariness, and breathed in excitement, and laid his head on Draco’s shoulder. Draco, moving as gingerly as though Harry were something new and dangerous he would need to swallow, put his arm around his shoulders.  
  
Conversation faltered for a moment, then continued. And the smile Ginny shot them was no less sweet than before.  
  
 _I can reconcile my different worlds,_ Harry thought as he laid his head on Draco more firmly, his hair brushing Draco’s collarbone.  _I can.  
  
_ We  _can_ , said Draco, tossing the words like a spear.  
  
And Harry found his hand, and held it, while his mind poured back silent agreement.


	3. Called to the Ocean

“Because I don’t want to trust the winds to carry us that far.”  
  
Draco only looked at him. Harry sighed and ruffled a hand through his hair. “Yes, I  _know_ that the first night we spent here was windy enough to carry us pretty far, but that was all over the plains. For all I know, the magic changes drastically when it gets to the ocean. Do you want to take the chance and then find ourselves stranded there with no way back?”  
  
“Weasley could come with the brooms to find us then.” Draco’s hand idly traced over a bent grass stalk in the small hollow where they had taken to sleeping. Harry had asked Andromeda after the celebration that night if they could come home, but she had only picked up Teddy and turned away without speaking. “Or we could walk back.”  
  
“Through dangers that we don’t know a lot about, wasting time,” Harry said, and shook his head, squatting down beside Draco. “Hey. Do you want to tell me  _why_ you’re so opposed to taking the brooms to the ocean?”  
  
Draco stared at him again. Harry cocked his head and concentrated. But the thoughts that came back to him really were a formless boil, popping bubbles and crackling water and steam. He sighed. “I’m trying, but I can’t read it out of your head. I think that I’m too new at this, at really paying attention to you.”  
  
“But only a short while ago, you were thinking about what a horrible person you are because you paid  _too_ much attention to me,” Draco said, and stretched his arms over his head as though he wanted Harry to admire them. Harry watched them, pale skin on the one, Dark Mark on the other, and wondered as he answered whether Draco had wanted him to be horrified.  
  
“I’m confused. I’ll admit that. But both you and Andromeda made the point that I’ve been paying too little attention to things that really matter. I’m trying to remedy that. Right now, though? If you want me to understand why you think our flying the brooms away to the sea is a bad idea, you’ll need to tell me.”  
  
Draco recoiled, and this time his thoughts turned sharp as daggers, immediately before he said, “I haven’t given you any grounds to compare me to my aunt.”  
  
“You both want me to do something else,” Harry said, and sat down. “Maybe you’re right, this time. There could be a good reason for us to go to the ocean with wind instead of brooms. Will you tell me what it is?”  
  
Draco did some more glaring. Harry just waited. The thoughts that came to him still seemed wordless, wind that he had no way of translating, and the rustle of grasses that the mummid might make as they walked through it. Sooner or later, he thought, Draco would give up the pretense and talk to him.  
  
*  
  
 _He could do it if he would only make the effort!_  
  
But Harry sat there, and Draco had to admit that he would rather tell him the truth than wait for him to guess something he would never guess. He crouched down beside him. Harry tilted his head up, and Draco paused, raising a hand to stroke the hollow of Harry’s throat instead of half-strangling him the way he’d almost planned.  
  
Harry was trying. He didn’t seem to be deceiving Draco. And so Draco sank down beside him, and sighed.  
  
“We lost one broom the first time that we went out,” he said. “That could happen again. And we have a means to fly that the others don’t. They need the brooms more than we do. Until Weasley’s bird grows up, even  _she_ will.” He wondered if Harry could hear how much effort it was for Draco to keep the venom where Weasley was concerned out of his voice. He hoped so. “I would rather do this, because that way, it seems that we’re going of our own free will, and taking responsibility for anything that might happen to us, too. Not as though we’re depriving them of a resource they might need while we’re gone.”  
  
Harry reached out and took Draco’s face between his hands, fingers lightly smoothing over his cheeks. Draco shut his eyes in spite of himself. He narrowed all his concentration and focus down to nothing more than Harry’s thumbs and forefingers, the faint sweaty smell of them, the callus he could feel on one of the thumbs.  
  
“Thank you,” Harry whispered. “That is a good plan. And—and maybe if we’re away from the camp for a little while, that’ll give Andromeda a chance to think about you, and realize that you’re not harmful to Teddy, and you deserve a place in our house, too.”  
  
“If there’s trees near the ocean,” Draco said, opening his eyes, prompted by a deep, pale desire to go on dazzling Harry, “that means we might be able to build our own house. Of  _wood,_ no less, and with less effort than the ones we’ve constructed so far. Then we would have a place that Teddy could visit and where my aunt wasn’t welcome, in turn.”  
  
Harry half-smiled. “I can see the reason for that impulse, but don’t you think we should concentrate on who’s welcome rather than who isn’t?”  
  
Draco pushed his frustration at Harry, and Harry’s smile faded again as he nodded. “Yeah, all right. It makes sense. I’ll talk to Andromeda again before we leave; maybe I can bring her around.” He rolled away on the grass and scowled up at the sky. “I never  _wanted_ to cause a breach between her and Teddy, you know? Or make her feel like she had to defer to me. I don’t know how I drifted so much into taking care of Teddy, it just happened.”  
  
“That part,” Draco said, lying down so that he could splay his hand over Harry’s stomach and admire the way it looked, “is not true. I know from some of the memories I’ve seen in your head, and from the way that you defended him when we first came to Hurricane. He matters more to you than simply someone you protected by accident. Do you want to try telling me the truth?”  
  
Harry’s mouth tightened for a second, and then he reached out and took Draco’s hand, dragging it roughly towards his mouth. Draco rolled with it, but otherwise let his arm be extended, let Harry clasp and hold him.  
  
“I wanted to protect Teddy the minute I realized Remus and Tonks had died,” Harry whispered. “But I thought I would die in battle with—him, so I knew I couldn’t.”  
  
“Thank you for not saying the name,” Draco whispered, because he could say that aloud in return for Harry’s consideration.  
  
Harry looked at him, mouth tight and eyes dark the way they had so often been when they first came to Hurricane, and then nodded and looked away again. “You’re welcome,” he mumbled. “I just—I knew that I wanted nothing more than that when I came back. I wanted to give him the childhood I never had.”  
  
“In the wizarding world?” Draco asked delicately.  
  
Harry’s mind snapped out tendrils of purple and wound-green, but he nodded. “That, and in other ways. No one was going to tell  _him_  that they didn’t know who his parents were. And Andromeda can talk about Tonks, of course she can, she’s her daughter, but I don’t know how well she knew Remus. I’m the one who tells Teddy stories of his father.”  
  
“You’ve lived with Teddy and Andromeda for two years now,” Draco said quietly, and breathed down the side of Harry’s neck. Harry stirred, but didn’t turn his head away, so Draco smiled and spoke his next words into the same place. “Why don’t you know how well she knew Lupin?”  
  
Harry was silent. Draco did some more breathing and waiting, and Harry finally reached out and ran his fingers through Draco’s hair, so light and scratchy that Draco arched in spite of himself. Harry arched right back, and kissed him.  
  
Draco returned the kiss with some smugness and more joy—it was the first time Harry had acted as if the sexual side to the bond was something he could initiate, too—but pulled away and shook his head. “Don’t think that you’re actually getting out of talking about why you and my aunt aren’t close.”  
  
“I know,” Harry said, his voice deep and his eyes swirling with what looked like a dozen complicated emotions. Draco touched his mind and had to pull back, because it felt armed with knives. “But—the answer is that I don’t really know her. She vanished into her grief, and I would ask her to do things, and sometimes she did them.”  
  
“So you don’t know her as a person.” Draco rolled on top of Harry and pinned his hands to the ground because he could. Harry turned his fingers and ran them up the insides of Draco’s wrists, and Draco bucked down at him, his erection rubbing and rutting against Harry’s. “You didn’t try to know?”  
  
“I didn’t want to push her,” Harry said, and turned his head so that he could bite the side of Draco’s knee.  
  
Draco laughed a little, breathlessly. He was literally thin skin over hard bone there, and it wasn’t like Harry could manage to get a good grip. Sure enough, Harry pulled back without drawing blood and glared at Draco.  
  
“I went through some grief like that myself,” Harry muttered. “For Fred, for Tonks, for Remus. For Sirius and Dumbledore. Only not as close, because I never lost three members of my family, and all at once.”  
  
Draco slid downwards until their chins touched. “You could have pushed,” he whispered. “But you didn’t want to be the bad person. The evil one.” Harry’s body tensed beneath him, and Draco listened to that for once instead of the melee in Harry’s mind. At the moment, he didn’t know if Harry himself realized what he felt. “The Death Eater.”  
  
Harry shoved at him with his knees. “Are we going to fuck or not?”  
  
Draco kept murmuring things that Harry didn’t want to be as he conjured the lube onto his fingers, because it made Harry writhe, although Draco knew that was a combination of the words and his tone, and not all the writhing was the good kind. “The villain. The anti-hero. The one who took charge. The leader. The one who offered some kind of hope. The caretaker. The  _responsible_ one.”  
  
“Yeah, sometimes I don’t want to be that, although you’re wrong about the rest,” Harry said, and spread his legs so Draco fell down between them. “Come  _on_.”  
  
And he kept his voice yammering as Draco entered him, his head whipping back and forth, his legs squeezing around Draco’s waist hard enough to make Draco bend down and gasp when Draco was finally inside him.  
  
“Hero,” Draco whispered as he began to move, shoving inside and feeling Harry gasp beneath him, more than he heard it. “Always the bloody hero, no matter what you do, no matter where you are—”  
  
He lost the words into a moan as Harry slammed his hips home, and he could feel Harry grinning up at him. “Who’s fucking, and who’s talking?” he demanded.  
  
Draco closed his eyes and gave himself up to the demands of his body. It felt so  _good,_ this steady dance with Harry beneath him and their joined breaths racing through their bodies and exploding out their lips, and when he reached out to Harry’s mind this time, it was smooth and full of light, and blazed in his hands for the moments before Harry reached orgasm and it simply exploded, flooding Draco with white light and tremendous heat.  
  
He slowly drew himself out of Harry when he realized that he was sprawled across him, and that his head and hands were dangling limply on Harry’s chest. He panted and licked his lips, and stared some more at Harry, who was starting to turn his head slowly back and forth, touching his lips as if he wondered why they were bloodied.  
  
“Someday,” Draco said, but then he couldn’t think of a good way to end that sentence, and lay down beside Harry, his arm curving over him instead. He could have performed Cleaning Charms, but he didn’t want to.  
  
Harry grunted, and closed his eyes. Draco lay there, thinking of all the many things they were and weren’t, until sleep claimed him, too.  
  
*  
  
“That idea at least sounds a little less mad now that you’ve shown us you can fly.”  
  
Harry smiled at Hermione, and nodded to Draco. “It was Draco’s idea to show that we could do that,” he said, and felt the sweet, brief flash of light from Draco as he responded to Harry giving him credit. “The main thing I was concerned about was—well, do you think that it’ll make people worry about being undefended, if we leave like that?”  
  
“Not as much as it would have before we found the rabbits.” Hermione nibbled her hair as she drew it over her shoulder. Her face was streaked with sweat and dirt, but that wasn’t unusual, when she had been working in the greenhouses. Draco and Harry had worked there for a while beside her before Harry told her about their plan of going to the ocean, so at least no one could say they were skiving off. “And Ginny finding the ocean will help, too. Someone has to go explore it. I wish  _I_ could.”  
  
Harry traded rueful grins with her. Hermione had never been the best flyer, and it would take longer than the risk could justify for her to walk there.  
  
“We’ll bring back our memories, if nothing else,” he said. “And more plants, animals if we find them.”  
  
“I still have some of the vials that I could collect Potions ingredients in,” Draco said quietly. “I haven’t used them. They were more for sentimental value, since I doubted I would get the chance to brew here. But we can use them to preserve what we find.”  
  
Harry blinked at him, then reached out and put his hand on Draco’s knee. Draco covered Harry’s hand with his without looking away from Hermione.  
  
“That will limit the size of what you can collect, but it’s the best solution,” Hermione said, after a pause that all of them seemed to be waiting for to explode. “Well. Tell the others that you’re going, at least.”  
  
Harry nodded and stood up. “After you, Ron’s next.” They were going regardless, but he hadn’t spent much time with Ron lately, and he had the feeling that Ron would appreciate knowing almost first of all.  
  
Hermione abruptly flung her arms around him. “Be  _careful_ ,” she whispered into his ear, while Harry was still choking on the hair thrust into his mouth. “We can’t lose anybody, but you—just be careful, Harry.” She stepped away, took a deep breath as though stepping off a cliff, and thrust her hand out towards Draco. “You too, Malfoy.”  
  
Draco took her hand as if it was a dead fish and dropped it immediately afterwards, but Harry knew Hermione didn’t care about that; she was beaming because he had touched her willingly in the first place. “I’ll keep him safe, Granger,” Draco said, expressionlessly, but with his mind going off in fireworks for Harry to feel. “He’s important to me.”  
  
Hermione nodded and turned back to her work. Harry glanced around the camp, but his winds, gamboling and bringing him sounds as they blew back and forth across the hills, had already told him Ron was over by the pool, practicing with some of the water purification spells Angelina had told them about. He started in that direction.  
  
“While you have your task,” Draco said suddenly, “I have mine.”  
  
Harry turned around and stared at him. Draco wasn’t eager to visit Ron, of course, as Harry could tell by the sullen churning in his emotions, but he hadn’t said that he had something else to do, either. “What do you mean?”  
  
Draco shrugged a little. “Every time we’ve talked to my aunt, you and I have been in company. I was thinking she might be a little more susceptible if I talked to her alone.”  
  
Harry bit his lip. He had nothing to say against the plan, because he knew Draco wouldn’t hurt Teddy, and Andromeda was unlikely to be much affected by anything Draco could say, except positively. “But what she’ll say to you…”  
  
“I wouldn’t have said anything about it unless I was willing to risk it,” Draco said, his mind snapping with violent purple bolts of lightning. “And you’re awfully tender of my honor now. Where you haven’t been before.”  
  
“I’m trying to pay  _more attention_ ,” Harry snapped back. “If you hadn’t freaked out just now…”  
  
They spent a moment glaring at each other, and then Draco grunted and gestured with one hand to indicate that he was done with this silly argument if Harry was. “Go to your friend. I’ll talk to my aunt.”  
  
Harry squeezed Draco’s arm once, and walked towards the pool again. He might have made an excuse to come with Draco and see Teddy again, but he would say goodbye to him before he left, and Draco was right that so far, they’d been together every time Andromeda said insulting things to Draco.  
  
 _Thank you,_ Draco said, bright blue and gold clouding the emotions that he projected in Harry’s direction now.  
  
Harry blinked, shook his head, and found himself smiling long before he got to the point in his walk where it would have made sense to do so so that Ron could see him.  
  
*  
  
“Aunt Andromeda.”  
  
Draco watched the way all the muscles in her back locked when he spoke. Of course, who did she have to call her that? Teddy was her grandson, and Narcissa hadn’t had contact with her for years before Draco’s birth, to hear her tell it.  
  
Andromeda was sewing a rent shut in a small green shirt, while Teddy played half-naked on the floor of the house, with a few clacking wooden pieces that the surviving Weasley twin had made into a puzzle for him. He squealed when he saw Draco and ran towards him with the puzzle. “Hi!” he said, and spent a moment looking around before he said, “Draco!”  
  
Draco picked Teddy up and held him close. He thought he could come to like being called “Draco,” even more than “Cousin Draco.” It meant that his relationship with Teddy was different than the one Teddy had with Harry.  
  
Teddy grabbled and held him back, and gave him a sloppy kiss on one cheek. Draco put him down and opened his mouth, about to ask Teddy what he’d been doing.  
  
“I hate it when I see you near him.”  
  
Draco tilted his head back and met Andromeda’s eyes deliberately. She looked nothing like his mother, he decided, except for some of the delicate bones in her face and the general heaviness of her hair. Much more like Bellatrix. He wondered how much she would hate the comparison if he made it, and decided to save it for a moment when he really wanted to irritate her. “Why don’t you go play, Teddy?” he asked.  
  
“You come play.” Teddy tugged on Draco’s hand with both of his, and succeeded in staggering Draco a little; he wasn’t expecting it. He saw the faint smile on Andromeda’s face before she bent over the sewing. Well, perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps it would make her see him as human.  
  
“In a little while, Teddy,” Draco said, and patted him on the shoulder. “Go take apart your toy for me.”  
  
Teddy ran back to do that, and Draco turned and sat with his legs folded beneath him, facing Andromeda. Her hands were already gathering clumsily, and she ducked her head and flinched when Draco spoke.  
  
“You don’t like me,” Draco said. “That’s fine, actually. But you don’t get to take my cousin away from me, or Harry.”  
  
Andromeda ripped a stitch. Then she said, in a voice so low and filled with fury that Draco found himself liking her better already, “You weren’t  _here_ for the first two years of his life. You don’t know how I raised him.”  
  
Draco smiled at her. “From what Harry said, he was the one who did most of the raising. Oh, not that he phrased it like that,” he added, courteously, as Andromeda’s hands tightened on the thread and needle even more. “But it was perfectly obvious around the corners of his words. If anything, Harry doesn’t give himself enough credit for his own good efforts.”  
  
Andromeda shook her head. “I’m still Teddy’s grandmother. Harry—he’s helped, enormously, and Teddy would be devastated if you took him away.” She smoothed down the shirt she held and looked up.  
  
“Where was your side of the family?” she whispered. “When did you want to visit Teddy, talk about him, or even express sympathy that my daughter was  _dead_? You wouldn’t have cared Teddy was alive if you hadn’t happened to come to Hurricane with us. There’s nothing you can do to make up for those years of neglect. Those years and  _years_.”  
  
“I didn’t know you or my cousins were alive, no,” Draco said. “My mother didn’t talk about you, and we wouldn’t have dreamed of visiting. But isn’t the point of coming through the gate to let go of old grudges? You’ve seen the way that Harry and I have managed to do that, rather spectacularly, I might add.”  
  
Andromeda hunched her shoulders. “You’re going to disrupt it,” she whispered. “We were fine, we were  _happy,_ before you came along.”  
  
Draco shrugged. “Maybe you were. I don’t tend to trust what Harry says about it, because Harry would think he was happy no matter what, as long as he got to be with Teddy. I know how much part of coming to Hurricane was him thinking that it would be better to raise Teddy here than in the wizarding world. But now I’m here, and I want a relationship with my cousin.” He paused delicately, but Andromeda never looked up. “I want a relationship with my aunt, come to that, if she’ll give me one.”  
  
Andromeda did look up then. “All I see when I look at you is your father,” she said, “telling me that my daughter deserved to die, the one time that we ran into each other by accident after Nymphadora was born. All I can see is your mother, telling me that I could still use a slow poison on my husband and no one would suspect, that she could help me.”  
  
Draco blinked. He hadn’t known about either of those things. Active prejudice was going to be harder to work on than the passive prejudice against Muggleborns that he had assumed his parents were projecting.  
  
“Neither of them is here,” he said at last. “I am. Neither of them will ever come through the gate. I did. You might consider how much good you’re doing by denying the blood connection I have with Teddy and the bond I have with Harry.”  
  
“You still sneer his name,” Andromeda told her sewing. “Even when you’re caressing it. It’s awful to listen to.”  
  
Draco sighed and stood. “Then don’t have a relationship with me, if you don’t want to. But I want you to know that I won’t accept being blocked from Harry and Teddy. And I don’t think Harry will accept it, either.” He paused, then added, “You might consider that you’re going to drive Harry away far more effectively than I will.”  
  
More hunching. Draco came out of the house shaking his head, and waved goodbye to Teddy, who was still trying to figure out how to take his puzzle apart.  
  
 _I’m sorry,_ came Harry’s voice from the other side of camp.  
  
Draco sent a shrug in that direction, too.  _It’s fine. Why don’t you take me up while you say goodbye?_  
  
Wisely, Harry didn’t question that. He sent a wind instead, and Draco stretched his arms up, let it scoop him away, into the sky and the future.


	4. On Wings of Wind

“Slow  _down_.”  
  
Draco had said that a few times, but the wonderful thing about being connected with the bond, as Harry discovered now, was that they could tell what the other person meant when they concentrated enough. At least, Harry could with spoken words. Draco could probably do it with Harry’s unconscious thoughts, and soon he would be predicting his dreams.  
  
Draco gave an annoyed hiss. Harry shrugged back at him across the miles of air, and touched his mind again. Yes. It glowed golden and a faint peach color, like dawn in a distant land. Harry grinned. He thought he had the right to feel smug. Dangerous as this was, and under his control as it was, Draco liked it.  
  
Draco lashed him back with visions of all the things Harry had done that he  _hadn’t_ liked, and Harry rolled his shoulder and continued plunging ahead, wreathing Draco with visions of clouds and light and wind.   
  
The winds came to play with him here, dancing in the storm-blue sky that tinted to twilight at the edges with the evening coming on. They’d been flying all day, and still they had seen nothing but golden waves of grass, sometimes waving as the mummid danced and jumped across them in glimpses of white, but mostly bowing to the wind.  
  
Harry wondered what the Unspeakables who had explored these magical worlds had thought, when they first set foot here. Did they value the world as much as Harry did? Did they tilt their heads back to the magnificent breezes and think about them blowing on a very different kind of wizard, one who would live here in harmony with the landscape and not as an enemy to it?  
  
 _They were idiots for not feeling the wild magic in the wind. And the Ministry always wanted to control everything. They wouldn’t be able to imagine someone_ wanting  _to live in the way that we do._  
  
Harry tilted his head, for a moment wondering if that was Draco’s thought or his own, and then nodded agreement. Their minds tilted and balanced and clashed, and then Draco’s thoughts slid free and resumed their track that complemented Harry’s but wasn’t the same thing. Harry smiled into the distance. He could guess that independence of mind—not forsaking the bond, but also not mixing up which thought belonged to who—was as important to Draco as it was to him.  
  
 _I’ve been wondering why so many people jumped at the chance to leave the wizarding world. I know the Ministry wanted to get rid of trouble-seeking elements and wanted to get rid of critics, but they couldn’t have anticipated that as many people would want to leave as did. And the more I think of it, the more I think it was a stupid plan, because their really dedicated critics wouldn’t leave and give up the chance to keep criticizing them._  
  
Harry turned over on his back and watched the darting, flat, thin clouds as he replied.  _They wanted to distract attention, that’s all. They could have done this in the past if they’d put the magic and resources behind it. But they did it when they did to create a media spectacle and take some attention off the trials._  
  
Draco remained silent as the clouds for long moments, while they wheeled and ducked and dived. Then he said,  _That makes more sense than I wanted to imagine. Then who were the people without the personal reasons to emigrate that we did?_  
  
Harry flipped over and did a looping circle the way he used to do on his broom, closing his eyes. This was better than flying on anything but the Firebolt Sirius had given him, and since that one’s shattering, it was better than anything.  _People who were tired, like we were. There were more of them than you’d think. The Ministry has the power to ignore the opinions of people who are apathetic or leaving, but the ones in power are a small group. We could have overwhelmed them if we wanted to. The problem is…we just didn’t care enough about the wizarding world._  
  
For a moment, his mind clouded, but Draco sent the clouds fleeing with another derisive sniff.  _You saved them once. You did more than enough._  
  
Harry nodded.  _And the other part of it is the war. That tainted the wizarding world for a lot of us, fairly or unfairly._  
  
He was silent for some time, and then Draco said,  _You have changed since you came here, you know. Guilt over what you left behind wouldn’t even have occurred to you when we arrived. You were focused then on protecting Teddy, and I don’t believe that anyone could have talked you out of it._  
  
Harry nodded, but kept his eyes fastened ahead.  _That doesn’t mean I’ll ever not want to protect him._  
  
The disgusted sigh could probably have made a lot of the hair on his head go flat, if Draco had wanted to expend the breath to make the sound aloud.  _That’s not what I meant. Of course you’ll want to protect him. No one would ever try to make you_ not  _want that._  
  
Harry said nothing, but Draco could pick up on the suspicion well enough.  _No, not even me. Not even in the times when I was the most obsessed with you. I think it helps that he’s my cousin. That’s a relationship that I can—accept, in a way. It makes sense to me that you would want to be with him._  
  
Harry nodded back, in the slow way that Draco probably wanted him to fly.  _Thank you. Sometimes I thought that no one else would understand that. My friends know that I love Teddy, but they still thought I was tying myself down and taking on too much responsibility too early.  
  
If that was all you did, then I would agree with them. But you also hunt and use your wind magic to defend the camps and fuck me. So that’s a variety in your activities._  
  
Harry laughed aloud, and it sounded strange. But he held a hand back to Draco, and Draco cut one of the winds that Harry had sent to hold him up and fell to a height that meant he could touch Harry’s. He had no claws on it this time, and his fingers brushed gently up and down Harry’s palm, thrilling Harry with the sense of muted power.  
  
 _You love the wild magic. Although you don’t admit it much._  
  
“Yes,” Harry said, again aloud, not because he had to but because he thought the words deserved that kind of weight. “I do.”  
  
Their little bubble of privacy and silence encircled them for some minutes before Draco twitched away again, and Harry sent wind to support him. They flew on, the grass of Hurricane tossing beneath them, the plains rippling away into the golden distance.  
  
*  
  
They slept one night on the way, in a deep hollow sheltered among higher hills. Draco watched the small stream that splashed down and formed a large pool in the bottom of the hollow, and thought this might have been where they should have chosen to make their camp.  
  
Harry only shook his head when Draco suggested that. “There might be reasons to move our camp closer to the ocean,” he said. “Depending on the kinds of food and other resources that we find there. But this hollow is too small to hold everyone. Someone would have to build on the outside of the hills, and there goes our best defensive resource.”  
  
Draco sniffed. He could have said something biting about precious Weasleys and their precious privacy and how they didn’t appear to realize that they were living in a world that didn’t  _have_ as many luxuries now, but he didn’t.  
  
Besides, he was just as happy to have some distance between himself and the rest of them when he wanted to be alone with Harry.  
  
They flew on, and around mid-afternoon—or so Draco thought; sometimes it was hard to make sense of Hurricane’s days, with fewer hours of daylight but a much longer dawn and twilight—Draco pulled up, staring down. Harry, who’d been occupied into staring dreamily ahead into the blue as always, pulled up and looped back when he noticed that Draco was no longer keeping pace with him.  
  
“What…” And then even Harry’s voice trailed away when he saw the flowers in bloom.  
  
They flew along in silence above them, those fields of flowers that rippled up and down as though someone was beneath them and blowing on them, although Draco knew it was only an effect caused by the wind and their very light and feathery petals. They looked as tall as the grass they had replaced, and their color was a sort of white-silver that had made Draco pause at first, because he had thought it might be the foam shining on the edge of the ocean. He stared, and he shook his head, and he wondered what he could say.  
  
“Ginny didn’t mention this,” Harry murmured. “I wonder why not?”  
  
As much as it would have cheered Draco to hear that Harry was beginning to share his suspicions of Girl Weasley and how bloody gracious she seemed all the time, he knew this wasn’t the sort of thing that should make him suspicious. Draco shook his head.  _She was flying too high. She never reported those ranges of hills we saw yesterday, either._  
  
Harry nodded, his greedy eyes still fastened on the flowers. “We have to go down and gather some of the heads and seeds for Hermione,” he said, and dived.  
  
Draco followed because the wind tugged him in that direction, but he did manage to say,  _And because it might be useful to feed the rest of the camp, too, and keep the rest of us alive._  
  
Harry waved a hand back at him to say that he understood that reason but wasn’t impressed by it, and pulled up like a diving hawk not far from the tops of the flowers. Draco watched, and swallowed back the saliva that would otherwise have flooded his throat. They didn’t have time for that right now.  
  
Harry, at least, shot him a brilliant smile accented by a blush, to say that he understood and was flattered, and then went to work pinning and examining the flowers with his winds before he gestured to Draco to cut them. The basic shape of the flower-head was a sort of star, Draco thought, four large silky petals, as transparent as gauze, pointing a little off true to the four points of the compass. In the middle were much more numerous but smaller petals, a little thicker in color and texture, making the flower spark and shine white and silver. Draco reached down and caressed one before he cut the stem, and it felt like true silk against his skin. That made him wonder if they could harvest them for clothes. The mummid certainly weren’t going to give them any wool.  
  
 _We can think about that,_ said Harry, with an approving caress of wind, and then Draco went to work cutting the flowers.  
  
By investigating beneath the heads, they found that seed pods were carried in tightly curled leaves under the petals. Draco wondered how they reproduced, if the seeds were pollinated yet or not. Perhaps they were, and the flowers simply opened at some point and threw them all to the winds. The storms of Hurricane would carry them far enough.  
  
Harry abruptly jerked his head up beside him. Draco frowned at him, wondering if one of his thoughts had triggered Harry’s fears about betraying his friends, or leaving them behind, or something. That seemed to be what he feared most at the moment.  
  
“What is it?” he asked, when Harry’s mind remained murky and reaching out to him got him nothing but a sharp reprimand.  
  
“Don’t you hear the winds?” Harry turned his head to face him, and Draco recoiled a little before the glaze of his bright eyes.  
  
“No,” Draco snapped back. “That isn’t my sort of magic, and you know it.” He gestured with his hand down his body; he was hovering on an eddying current at the moment that kept him basically in the same place, with little bobbing motions, and it wasn’t like he could have created that himself.  
  
“The winds,” Harry whispered. “The winds are  _moving_.”  
  
A moment later, before Draco could even think the word, Harry nodded. “Storm coming,” he said, and set about stuffing the pods and the flower heads they’d gathered in the empty pouches some of the Weasleys had given him for collecting fish.  
  
Draco moved as rapidly, his gaze going in all directions before he spotted the dark blue that indicated the storm. It was right above them, and lowered like a cloud as he watched. “Are they  _supposed_ to do that?” he demanded, staring.  
  
“Come down from above?” Harry didn’t look up from the flowers he was continuing to gather. “Not exactly. But in this case, I can hear the winds singing. They’re celebrating it. The worst storms come when they’re high in the sky like that.”  
  
Draco grimaced. “Celebrating,” he said flatly. “The way they did at the birth of the bird.”  
  
Harry gave him a wry grimace. “The winds don’t have the same view of consequences that we do,” he murmured, bowing his head and raking his fingers through his hair as though thinking about it this way was giving him a headache. “They don’t want to do anything but blow.”  
  
“Sometimes I might like you better if you thought like that,” Draco said.  
  
Harry got the joke after a moment, and nodded to him. “I know, but this isn’t the kind of thing that we can survive in the air.” He reached out for Draco’s hand. “Do you trust me to find a place that can shelter us?”  
  
Draco looked around, about to suggest that they stay in the field of white flowers, but the words dried up on his tongue when he saw the way the flowers’ heads rippled up and down, endlessly bobbing. They wouldn’t provide much protection, and it was better to find a place where they could discover that.  
  
 _If such a thing exists._  
  
 _It does,_ Harry said back to him, in a calm, normal voice, and then they were flying, faster than Draco had dreamed of going, over the flowers and up again, but not too high. Draco could feel the magic hammering at their backs, the huge punishing blows that were soft by the time they got to them, either because Harry was holding them at bay somehow or because the storm was still too far away to deal a harder castigation.  
  
But it was enough to make Draco glad that he had someone else with him who would help him survive. Someone to whom he already owed enough life-debts that acquiring another one wouldn’t matter.  
  
 _We don’t think of each other like that, any more,_ Harry whispered.  
  
Draco would have argued, but then, he made a point of not arguing with people who could read his mind, a truth that Harry hadn’t always learned. He tightened his hand on Harry’s in answer, and held on as they fled.  
  
*  
  
The hell of it…  
  
Harry tossed his head back and tasted the air. It blew past him, cold and sweet and alluring and dangerous. The storm was already cooling things, although the daytime temperature on Hurricane was almost never too hot anyway, and traveling in the upper air made things colder. The breezes that brushed past him made Draco rock, and Harry channeled the wind he controlled to protect him more effectively.  
  
And meanwhile, the magic yanked and sang at him and whispered promises so dense in the back of his mind that Harry wasn’t sure he understood. But he could follow the susurrus of those promises if he wanted to, yes.  
  
The hell of it was, Harry was tempted to stay out of hiding and ride the storm.  
  
And he thought he might survive it.  
  
But he had Draco with him, and Draco meant more than the chance to ride a storm that he wasn’t sure he could survive, as exhilarating as that would be. He held Draco’s hand, and they skid and skittered ahead of the storm, the winds that roared and shouted in Harry’s ears, the pressure that he could feel descending from the sky to cap the entire plain of flowers and hills and grass.  
  
The ground abruptly dropped away from in front of them, and Harry heard the steady roar that he had expected to hear before now. Yes, Ginny must have flown too high to see the flowers or any other landmarks like the small hollow where he and Draco had spent the last night. There was the ocean, curling in a line of blue-silver up and down in the distance, as hazy and beautiful as the flowers.  
  
Draco gasped something out beside him. Harry wasn’t sure what it was, but he felt the panic from Draco’s direction, as sharp and bitter as nausea.  
  
Harry dived and wrapped his arms around Draco, pulling him close to his chest. Draco struggled against him for a moment, as though he assumed that Harry was going to smother him, or he couldn’t stand not to be in control the way he was during their fucking. But Harry ducked his head until their chins collided and whispered a harsh command to be quiet, while his winds smothered them all around in close-moving, cool air.  
  
The storm struck.  
  
Harry heard the scream of the winds, building and rising, the lordship of the air asserting its control over the planet. And then that great wind hit their cocoon.  
  
They went bowling and rolling away, so many times over and over that Harry had no way to stay their flight and no way even to be sure where they were going. There was the sky, the horizon, the ocean—there was too much sickening sensation for him to keep track or control. He hid his eyes against Draco’s hair, breathing in great gasping gulps. He knew he wouldn’t be able to breathe if not for the wind that was wrapped around them, either.  
  
“Harry,” Draco whispered, his mind jabbing and hitting, so uncoordinated that Harry knew how afraid he was.  
  
“Shhh,” Harry whispered back, because he needed to give as much of his concentration as he could to flying, so that it wouldn’t dump them on their backs and hurt them. Or smash them down and leave them in parts all over the ground, Harry thought. There was that disadvantage if he stopped paying attention, too.  
  
They tumbled and rolled, and at last they came to rest against something hard and huge. Harry didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t care. There were no animals on Hurricane who wouldn’t have started running once they hit them, and anything else, any land formation, was a protection against the wind.  
  
He turned and held out his hands. Winds outside the cocoon—he could feel them acting only by the thrumming of his magic in his blood, not by the way they moved, given the storm that was all around them and taking precedence—shot past them and hit the formation. A hill, Harry thought, from the solidity with which they struck it. They kept moving in bands that rippled the grass, tracking the same eddy-pattern again and again, and also curled around his arms in bands of air. It was the closest Harry could come to holding them still until he dismissed the cocoon of air.   
  
He lowered his head and whispered into Draco’s ear at the same time as he did it into his mind, “Do you trust me?”  
  
Draco’s head nodded furiously. It took a moment to do so, but Harry understood that. He would have hesitated for more than a moment himself, if he was in this position and Draco was the one whispering to him.  
  
Harry turned so that he was as flat against the hill as he could be, clutched Draco to him with his legs as well as his arms, and let the cocoon of air fly away from them.  
  
For a moment, just a moment, he was choking on the storm, feeling tendrils of hair literally whip his cheeks, his eyelashes fraying from the force of the wind, his mouth open in gasps that hurt. There was too much wind in his lungs, too much wind on his face, too much wind _everywhere._ Everything ached, and he was close to letting himself dissolve into a creature that could live in the air simply because it would hurt less.  
  
But Draco’s weight anchored him, and so did the responsibility he had to care for Draco. Again he bowed his head forwards and kept guard over Draco that way, his chin surfing up and down over his hair as he threw his own winds frantically, binding them to the hill, sending air into every tiny crack in the earth and break in the stone that he could, holding them there.  
  
Then he spun the cocoon again, this time in a huge dome that covered both them and the wind-bonds that anchored them to the hill.  
  
And the storm went back to battering the outside of the dome.  
  
Harry opened his eyes, gasping. He reached up and felt gingerly around his face, but found only a few drops of blood. Well, at least the storm hadn’t damaged his ability to see, he thought, and shook his head.  
  
“How did you do that?”  
  
Harry looked down. Draco was heaving himself up in his own bonds of air—they were flexible enough for that—and glaring at him from a few centimeters away. He reached up and put his hand on the side of Harry’s head, and Harry cringed before he realized that the thoughts coming from Draco’s mind didn’t include slapping every bit of nonsense out of him.  
  
“I knew that I could hold us here,” Harry said cautiously, and moved his arm to demonstrate the way that the invisible rope of air rippled his sleeve and his hair. “But I had to take the cocoon away to do that. Otherwise, the ropes would have had to go through the cocoon, and that would have left holes that the storm could come in, too.”  
  
“But you were tempted to fly away and leave me.”  
  
No use lying, not when Draco was intimately involved with the way that every thought in Harry’s head moved. Harry nodded. “I didn’t give in, but I was tempted.”  
  
Draco’s face, astonishingly, melted into a smile, and the emotions coming from his mind were a delicate mix of peach and rose-gold again. “Good,” he murmured, and let his head rest on Harry’s chest. “I wasn’t sure that you  _could_ be tempted. That you could ever want power the way I want it.”  
  
Harry nodded, blinked, and put his hands on Draco’s shoulders and the nape of his neck, holding him close, while outside their cocoon the storm sang and vibrated and shook the whole of its planet.  
  
And the breezes that blew past them had a salt-sea tinge.


	5. To the Sea, To the Sea

It was midday, and they were flying again.  
  
Draco couldn’t stop breathing the air that soared past them, the little breezes that Harry controlled and the madder ones that he didn’t. The hurricane had left Hurricane streaked and riddled with freshness, sweetness, softness, cleanliness. There was a deep smell that seemed to travel with them, and which Draco thought came from the flowers that they had harvested and that the storm had more than half-uprooted.   
  
And there was the smell of salt.  
  
Harry claimed that he had smelled it last night, when the winds had finally died and they’d rested on the side of the hill in Harry’s bonds of air, too exhausted to go any further. But Draco hadn’t been able to, not until this morning when he opened his eyes and saw the dawn bulging from all corners of the horizon, and breathed in.  
  
It made his mouth water. It made him remember flavors in food that he had almost forgotten, sour and spicy and sweet as well as bitter. Of course some salt had come with them, but they had to ration it carefully, not just sprinkle it on their food whenever they wanted it.  
  
Draco smiled. If they found enough salt in the seawater, if they could use the charms Johnson had mentioned that would purify it, they might have enough salt left over afterwards to pile on their tongues.  
  
They came over the last drift of hills, and there it was. The land had been sloping steadily downwards for some time now, but it was still a shock, to see the way the hills tumbled off and the grass began to wither as it approached the water. The land in front of the beach wasn’t quite sand, or pebbles, or stone, or grass, but a mixture of all of them, running into one another, in great sable and brown and white streaks.  
  
Draco wanted to touch it, and started to cut the winds. But Harry held his hand up, and Draco felt the tremble in his mind, and looked further.  
  
The ocean was dazzling.  
  
Of course Draco had seen the sea on Earth, and if this had been no different, it would not have dazzled him. But there was a pale blue to the water that did not reflect the sky, or the corners of the sky that Draco could see blooming with the colors above him, and there was a line of silver at the edge that meant curling foam, and there was a washed-out color nearer shore that reflected what the shore was made of.  
  
Draco lost his heart to it at once, and continued breathing salt until they reached the shore and Harry began to slow and lower the winds that carried them. Draco understood that he didn’t want to risk the winds that carried them out over the ocean possibly being different and wilder than the ones on land. He did understand that.  
  
But part of him mourned at it. Part of him would have liked to go on sailing over that ocean forever until he fell into it, dead of starvation. There would be no dying of thirst when he had those salt-soaked breezes to feed him.  
  
“Are you all right?”  
  
Harry’s voice, from beside him. Draco reached out towards him, not with his hand but with the thoughts that ricocheted back and forth inside his head, and heard Harry swallow. “Yes,” Draco whispered. “This is the reason that you should try to learn to read my mind, because you can feel and experience things that you would never feel on your own.”  
  
Harry was silent, but Draco felt the delicate pulse and shimmer of his emotions reflecting back at him, and smiled.  
  
They landed on the shore a few meters away from the water. Draco looked around, expecting a sight of the trees that Weasley had found her milk on, but didn’t see them. Presumably she had come to a different part of the beach.  
  
And then he caught Harry’s eye, and smiled.  
  
They raced each other to the water, and Draco crouched down and held his hands out, trembling. The foam licked over the backs of his fingers, so delicate, so soft, that it was like being touched by light itself. Draco shut his eyes and bowed his head.   
  
“It’s  _ _warm__ ,” Harry whispered. Draco opened his eyes and turned his head, and saw Harry balancing on the balls of his feet, bending forwards so far that he was going to fall flat on his face in a minute. “I thought oceans were always cold.”  
  
“Maybe it has wild magic that keeps it so,” Draco said, and faced the water, readying his own magic. “Or the creatures that live there turn the water warm so they can live in it.” He wondered, for a moment, whether the ocean would have the same, almost living will that the winds of Hurricane seemed to have.  
  
Perhaps not. The winds seemed to be the conduits and currents of Hurricane’s wild magic, and it made sense that they would seem more alive and impressive simply because they thrummed with the tension of holding it all in.  
  
But at the same time, Draco could not bear the thought that this wonderful ocean was not at least a  _ _little__ bit aware of what was going on around it.  
  
He had to put the speculation aside, because Harry had sensed what he was going to do and moved out of the way, and Draco felt a bolt of pride at that that nearly undermined his concentration. He faced the ocean instead, and took a stern little breath, waggling his fingers until he felt the claws pop out. Then he envisioned the same sort of arrow that he used on the grasses and the beasts of the grasses, aimed at an offshore rock that gleamed as if it was entirely made of mica, and threw.  
  
The waters curved up and away from the impact, sheeting and sheering, revealing undertones of green and pink, blue and white, that made Draco’s heart ache. And several large bodies, too, waving like ribbons, a deeper blue and green than the air. They changed color immediately, trying to blend with the water and hide, but Draco smiled. Cleave the ocean around them, and they couldn’t do it.  
  
“We could hunt,” he told Harry. “We could have a hunt here that’s different from any other we’ve ever had.”  
  
“Except the bird,” Harry said, but his stance had altered. Draco knew he had folded his arms at one point, but now he had dropped them and was leaning forwards on the balls of his feet again. “Remember that one?”  
  
“We were in the air then,” Draco said, “and that’s your domain. With a little practice, I think the water could become mine. Won’t you let me try?” He realized, to his faint, horrified amusement, that his voice had become a bit of a whine. Harry raised his eyebrows in Draco’s direction, but nodded.  
  
“I’ll herd them, then,” he said, and flew up and out over the ocean before Draco could remind him about his fear of the winds changing there.  
  
The winds didn’t change, or they were enough like the winds over the land that they could at least bear Harry. Harry turned in place, his hair springing back from his face, and nodded to Draco, and Draco realized that he had caught his breath out of pure beauty. He smiled, and blinked, and then cast with both hands at once.  
  
The first cleft the water, and the second whipped the spear sideways, through the bodies of the creatures that glowed there. When the waves that Draco had created tried to splash back down and hide the creatures, Harry snapped out his hand, and winds circled under the water, lifting it in a fiery, sparkling fan above the surface, and holding it. Draco laughed aloud as he watched the creatures circle and try to change colors, but have to choose between the water around them and the reflections gleaming from over their heads.  
  
Then the ones he hadn’t killed vanished again, but Draco had the bodies he could draw into shore, by imagining that he bore those enormous claws and dipping them, carefully, beneath the floating corpses. It seemed easier than it had been in the past. Draco thought about how the very sight of the ocean had seemed to shake his bones in their casing of skin, and shivered.  
  
 _ _Yes. This is the way that I am meant to hunt.__  
  
*  
  
Harry flew down and landed beside Draco as he laid the bodies out on the shore. They kept changing color, until they were out of the sea, and then they shimmered and snapped into deep versions of the last hues they’d worn, as if they had to make up for being out of the water by representing it on land.  
  
Blue, and green, and deep rose. Harry let his fingers hover above that one, and wondered whether it was possible that the pink lingered under the surface of the water, the way it seemed. Or did the pink come from some reflection of the sunrise, assuming that any shone on this shore?  
  
“Beautiful, aren’t they?”  
  
Harry blinked, and then realized that Draco was looking at him, and didn’t seem to intend his question as a rhetorical one. He smiled and nodded. “Beautiful,” he echoed.   
  
“And delicious, I’d bet.” Draco let his hand hover on the tail of something that looked like an eel with two legs where its mouth should be, and stared at Harry. “What do you think? Should we try one now?”  
  
Harry shook his head. “We don’t have someone like Primrose to test them for us, I don’t know purifying charms that work the same way on food as on water, and if you’re incapacitated, then I lose someone I really  _have_ to have beside me.” He reached out, hesitated as he wondered how well Draco would take it, and then let his fingers touch Draco’s shoulder and rub up and down.  
  
Draco grasped his hand and murmured,  _Remember that you can read my mind, and that should tell you well enough whether I would welcome it or not._  
  
Harry nodded, but leaned up to kiss Draco instead of responding. Draco wavered, then pulled back with a laugh. “Who wants to fuck now for no reason?” he gasped, as he reached into his cloak for the collection vials and started laying them on the beach. “And there isn’t even any grass here to cushion us.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “I didn’t want to fuck right now. I just wanted to show you how much you mean to me.”  
  
Draco paused and eyed him, then looked at the nearest animal, one that Harry thought resembled a fish, but with long fins, exactly the same length, displayed at exactly the perfect ratio of angles around its body. “Are these bodies shedding fumes that I haven’t smelled?” he murmured. “Who are you, and what have you done with the Harry Potter that hates doing things like this?”  
  
Harry shook his head. His pulse was pounding in his mouth. It seemed important that Draco listen to him, and if that was a side-effect of the fish, or the wind over the ocean, or something else, then Harry could only thank it. “I don’t—Draco, I want you to know that you  _do_ mean a lot to me.”  
  
Draco went on staring. Then he said, “Accept that I’ve accepted that. Was there something else you wanted to say?”  
  
Harry thought it over. For a moment, he had wanted to persist, ask questions and push his revelation on Draco so that Draco would react in some way that said he thought it was an honor, not an annoyance.  
  
And then Harry had to swallow a laugh of his own. He had thought the bond was an annoyance in the beginning, one that Draco was far more interested in than he was. He’d fought it back and fought a sulky Draco when he’d insisted that Harry should be honored by his attention and the fact that Draco had chosen him as his partner.  
  
“Never mind,” Harry said, catching Draco’s hand and rubbing it back and forth again, then releasing it before Draco could force it free. “We’ll say that you’ve accepted it, then. But I did mean the point about the purifying spells for food. I think it’s best that we continue to collect these, and eat the food we brought with us, for now.”  
  
Draco watched him, then shrugged. “As I was doing,” he said, and set about forcing bodies to fit in the vials, mincing some when that was necessary, and shearing the long fins from the fish that bore them so he could put them in a separate vial.  
  
Harry faced the water, and smiled. This was a situation he couldn’t have envisioned himself in five months ago, or even five weeks ago, when they’d already been on Hurricane. He’d thought his whole purpose then was to guard Teddy, and he hadn’t known Hurricane had oceans—  
  
But most of all, he really couldn’t have envisioned Draco beside him.  
  
He sought out Draco’s hand again, and Draco let him, this time, until he really needed it to balance all the vials.  
  
*  
  
Draco opened his eyes. They had spent hours wandering up and down the beach, and Harry had taken him on a flight over the ocean that was both exhilarating and wonderful. They’d spent hours lying on a more sandy part of the beach, too, watching the way that night came in over Hurricane’s waves.  
  
Draco didn’t think he would ever forget that bath of burning gold being poured on the water, or the way the sky had turned to black with a clap when the sun sank beneath the surface. Technically, they had come east, and they were watching the sun set in the east, when it had seemed to set in the west near their camp, but then, Harry had pointed out, yesterday dawn had come from all points of the compass, so the wild magic near the water was probably doing something to their vision here.  
  
Still magnificent, nonetheless.  
  
But now something else had awakened him, and Draco remembered that there could be land predators who would come to the water to drink, or birds, or possibly herbivores who lived on those flowers and could be dangerous when they saw creatures they didn’t recognize.   
  
The noise repeated, a kind of grunting moan. Draco reached out and probed Harry awake with quick kicks and tangles of thought. Harry sat up and looked around, panting a little as though he didn’t know what Draco was about.  
  
Then he heard the sound. At once he turned to face it, and his body was as graceful in tension as it had been in sleep. Draco smiled lazily as he sat up. Now that Harry had finally noticed that Draco existed as a person in his own right, and one that he might like to spend time with when they  _weren’t_ fucking, Draco had his own permission to think thoughts like that.  
  
“What is it?” Draco whispered.  
  
Harry swallowed. He said, “Mummid.”  
  
Draco leaned around him, and saw that Harry was right. There was a ghostly procession coming down to the water, plunging from the downturned cliffs and falling easily on their feet like the goats they resembled. Draco nodded. “Maybe they can tell us things about the ocean, then. We should go greet them.” He started to stand up.  
  
“Don’t,” Harry hissed, reaching out and capturing his wrist before Draco found his feet. “The winds say it’s not a good idea.”  
  
Draco held his eyes until Harry had to face him, instead of ignoring the squirming of how stupid Draco thought this was in the back of his mind. “The winds,” Draco said, and loaded his mind with images of the grass and the ocean and how they  _felt_ alive, but weren’t, not really, and Harry was being stupid to imagine that the winds could talk with him.  
  
Harry shook his head. “I mean it, Draco. They danced in celebration at the birth of the bird, and when the storm started to come. Now they’ve fallen  _completely_ silent. I don’t understand it. I would have trouble raising a breeze right now if I wanted one.”  
  
Draco hesitated. He knew that the mummidade saw them as a united being, and one worth speaking to, because of their wild magic. What would happen if he and Harry tried to speak to them when only one of them could prove that he had the power? Come to think of that, Draco’s own magic might be less without the winds blowing over him.  
  
And at the very least, it would be embarrassing to have the mummid ignore them and continue attending to whatever they had come here for.  
  
“Well, I’m not just going to ignore them and pretend they don’t exist,” he said. “I want to see what they’re doing.”  
  
Harry nodded, and reached into his robes, coming out with a handful of starry nothingness that he shook. It reformed into a Cloak.  
  
Draco stared at it. Of course he recognized it. It was the Cloak that Potter had worn when he’d thrown mud at Draco in third year. Strange to think that that boy had been  _Potter_ , and this was Harry, standing beside him and breathing with him now.  
  
“Why did you bring that?” he asked. “You didn’t mention it.” And he had picked up thoughts from Harry’s direction a few days earlier that he wanted someone else to have the Cloak to hide under, if they needed to hunt while he and Draco were gone.  
  
“I decided, at the last minute, that there might be things at the ocean we needed to spy on, who wouldn’t suspect this,” Harry said softly, and draped the Cloak around his shoulders, reaching out to Draco with one arm. “It’s going to be a tight fit, I mostly hid under it with Ron and Hermione when we were kids. Do you want to?”  
  
Of course he wanted to, with a longing so powerful that it made Draco shiver as he stepped up to Harry and wrapped his arms around him, leaning his head on his chest so Harry could drape the Cloak over both their heads and pull them closer. He hadn’t known part of him was still wounded and wanting that way, that part of him even now resented the laughter Harry had shared with his friends at Hogwarts.  
  
 _I’m sorry._ Harry’s thoughts brushed over him, as light and rippling and tentative as the hands that he was using to stroke Draco’s shoulders and hair.  
  
Draco shook his head a little and demanded,  _Are you really sorry? Would you have said that at the time? Or do you just think that you should say it now because we’re closer and you wish you could make up for the past?_  
  
Harry blinked, his bafflement moving in slow, thick eddies through Draco’s mind. Then he said,  _The latter. I’m sorry because I wish we could have become friends earlier._  
  
And that eased an even different, tighter band of pain, one that had wrapped around a portion of Draco’s heart when Potter first rejected his hand. But he tightened his fingers in Harry’s shirt and said,  _I want to remember the past, not forget it. Don’t say sorry now. Say that you want me with you.  
  
Always, _Harry said, his emotions blooming in bright wind-patterns in Draco’s thoughts, and Draco relaxed in spite of himself as they began to creep along the beach after the rustling, moving mummid.  
  
*  
  
Harry felt the winds begin to move again as they neared the mummid and the small space of sand they seemed to have decided was the right place to begin. The winds’ dance was strange, though. It was small, and slower than usual, and focused on that tight patch of sand in the middle of the mummid ring, not anywhere else. Harry knew he wouldn’t have felt it moving at all—there was no ripple against his body, no touch of a breeze against his cheek—if his magic hadn’t attuned him to motions in the upper airs, away from his immediate area.  
  
It wasn’t magic as wide or wild as some he had felt on Hurricane, but it was more intense and focused. Harry shivered and reached out with one hand as though he could capture it.  
  
He saw the edge of his hand emerge from under the Cloak. Draco grabbed his arm at the same time as the warning thundered through Harry’s head, and Harry pulled it back and nodded. He thought they should keep even their mental communication to a minimum around the mummid right now. After all, the wild magic was part of the bond, and the bond was how the mummid around their camp identified them as individuals.  
  
 _Why do we want to spy on them in the first place?_  
  
Harry shivered. Because they were still strangers, even if they were also allies. And because their alliance with the mummidade was meant to help defeat the birds, not allow them access to something like this.  
  
And he  _wanted_ access. From the stillness of the wind, from the depth of the night around them, Harry knew that this was personal, but also important.  
  
Something that might impact human survival on the planet, perhaps.  
  
Two mummid stepped away from the others and faced each other. They both had golden horns and brown eyes and sloped bodies, which left Harry thinking they were both male. He wondered if they were seeing a fight for courtship rights.  
  
The mummid didn’t charge each other, though. They both scraped their left forehooves in the sand, then their right forehooves, and so on all around the body. Then both fell to the ground and pressed their knees and the part of leg between knee and hoof into the pebble-streaked sand. Then it was their chests, bowed and knocked, and their necks, laid on their sides, and their horns, rubbed into the dirt.  
  
 _It’s like a dance,_ Draco said, less words than an image of whirling partners and bright colors that was the analogue of the Yule Ball in his mind.  
  
Harry nodded, and watched as their impressed their back knees, and their spines, and their hips, and every other part of their bodies. He wondered if they were creating images in the yielding part of the ground, but they rolled over on top of them so often that he didn’t think so. Any “images” would have been trampled and obliterated by now.  
  
It was more like they wanted to bring every part of their bodies into contact with the ground, and to do it in perfect mirror image style. Of course, if they were a pair, that was possible with them. The mummid really weren’t  _individuals_ apart from each other.  
  
The mummid finally both surged back to their feet at the same time, and underwent one more bow to each other, horns brushing.  
  
And that intense, focused magic, which Harry had almost forgotten about in the pleasure of watching the mummid’s movements, descended on them.  
  
There was nothing like it that Harry had ever experienced, no analogue for what happened just then. The hammer blow made the sand fly, and caused the other mummid around them to fall to their knees, and made the Cloak whip back. Harry would have lost it if he wasn’t gripping it in such a death hold. He fell to his knees, too, though, with Draco trembling and incredulous in his arms, and Harry not much better.  
  
“What was that?” Draco whispered. “What the  _fuck_  was that?”  
  
Harry only shook his head, not sure what he could say. He had felt it, he could still feel the echoes ringing in his bones, and the way that sparks of magic rose and fell in the winds around them like scattered embers from a fire. But he didn’t know what they had seen happen.  
  
The ground shuddered and rolled beneath them, like waves coming in from the ocean. Then the mummid all floated to their feet again, with the same grace that they used to vanish among the grasses. Harry tried to stand, but Draco pulled him back down before the knocking of his knees could give them away.  
  
“Look,” Draco whispered. “ _Look_.”  
  
And Harry did, and that was how he saw the small, white, gleaming thing in the center of the mummid’s circle. The herd pressed close, staring at it, and it lifted its head and looked back at them, then stumbled to its hooves.  
  
It was—  
  
It was a newborn mummid, a young one, with the stubs of horns on its head and its fur all sleek and shining and close, like a shorn lamb’s. It wobbled up to the pair that had danced and rubbed against them, and Harry felt the magic wheeling around them, making them a unit of three, a new unit.  
  
Then the little one turned and greeted the rest of the herd, and all around them, flowing and dancing, forming and drifting apart, Harry felt the magic, felt the new threesomes or pairs forming, new individuals, because that was the way the mummid felt. Their “people” were groups, and the addition of someone new changed every group.  
  
“They created it,” Draco said, in a small, chiming voice from the other side of realization. “They created  _a child_.”  
  
Harry couldn’t speak. The winds were still moving in their lazy way around him, but picking up in a milder version of the dance he remembered from the hatching of Ginny’s bird, and his chest was tight, and his mind was alight and flaming with wonder.  
  
It continued to do so, long after the mummid had become a stream of foam wavering into the grass, the youngster running with them as well as any of the adults.   
  
And beside him, Draco burned with the same delight, the same unspoken desire.


	6. On Wide Fins

“You’re thinking about it.”  
  
Harry jumped. He’d been so busy watching the fire he’d struggled to build that he’d missed Draco coming up behind him, even the hum from the bond in his head that normally would have let him know. He stumbled, his hand scraped through the sand and flung it over the flames, and the fire went out.  
  
“ _Fuck,_ Draco,” he snapped, and leaned forwards to start it again.  
  
Draco flicked his wand and murmured a lazy incantation, and the fire leaped to life. Harry leaned back and shook his head, refusing to meet Draco’s judging gaze.  
  
“You could still do that if you hadn’t learned to rely so much on your wild magic that it destroyed your ability with a wand,” Draco murmured.  
  
“I could still do that if I hadn’t,” Harry agreed, and felt Draco’s eyes narrow although he wasn’t looking at him. “But I have given it up, and I have to live with the consequences of it.” He blew on the fire to help lift the flames higher, and then extended his hand. “Give me one of those fish you caught yesterday.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “Can’t you just read my mind and find out?”  
  
Draco stepped past him and crouched on the other side of the fire, his hands crossed almost primly at the level of his knees. The emotions churning from him had turned purple and green, and lightning bolts like the one on Harry’s forehead danced through the images he projected. Harry, meeting his gaze, didn’t care. “I’d prefer you to tell me,” Draco said evenly.  
  
Harry shrugged a little. “We can’t purify the fish yet, but I thought I’d see what their reaction to cooking is, anyway. Their color changed when they came out of the water. I want to see if anything else changes. Their smell, for example. If we cook them and they smell awful, we’d have trouble getting the others to eat them.”  
  
Draco sneered, but took out a collection vial. “Hungry people will eat anything. If they’re hungry enough.”  
  
“And when have you ever been  _hungry_?” Harry muttered, his eyes on the fire again and his mind full of Dursleys.  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
Harry glared at Draco. “You’ve lived a life with marble walls around you, and Galleons to buy anything you wanted,” he said. His voice was low and trembling, and he wanted to plant a fist in Draco’s stomach more than he had wanted to since they first began sleeping together. It didn’t help that he knew why, and that the anger was only a distraction. “You’ve lived—you’ve lived in  _luxury_. You don’t know what it’s like to be hungry.”  
  
“I do,” Draco said, and inched nearer. Harry found himself wondering if Draco intended to leap across the fire at him, and decided from the look in his eyes that he was probably mental enough to do it. “Maybe not for food, but I know the desperate yearning for something. I felt it before I came to Hurricane, and when the Dark Lord was still alive, and all through Hogwarts. And I have the werewolf to teach me about hunger, if I can’t listen to you.”  
  
Harry shut his eyes and turned his head dully away. “Don’t call Bill that,” he muttered. “He’s not one.”  
  
“I thought you didn’t consider it a term of insult, given who Teddy’s father was,” Draco said evenly. There was a long, long pause, and the bond between them thrummed, and then cleared up. “Why don’t you want to talk about the mummid ritual we saw last night, Harry? I can feel the thoughts burning you like a fever.”  
  
Harry sighed, and rubbed his hands over his face. “It’s not you, it’s me. I’m sorry. Can you let it go if I acknowledge that?”  
  
“No.”  
  
Harry lowered his hands, blinked in surprise, and then snorted. “Well. You’re honest, at least.”  
  
Draco raised his eyebrows, and didn’t move.   
  
Harry looked at his hands. “You’re thinking already about how we might use that to have a child,” he said quietly. “How it solves the problems of not having enough partners for everyone, or at least partners who can reproduce. How we’re bonded by the wild magic, and we could do it more successfully than anyone else. At least, anyone else human,” he added, his memories still full of the mummid pair’s flowing grace.  
  
Draco nodded. “You’re thinking about it as well,” he repeated, and really, if he said that again, it was nothing personal but Harry would have to kill him. “I don’t understand what barrier you can raise against it if we both want it.”  
  
“No, you  _wouldn’t,_ ” Harry muttered, but he at least owed it to Draco to explain after almost starting an argument with him over it. “Listen, Draco. Part of me does want that. I never thought I would find anyone I  _wanted_ to have children with, and it’s a little hard to conjure family out of thin air.” He met Draco’s eyes. “But I have Teddy. Can you imagine what another child would do to him? He’s trapped enough between me and his grandmother as it is.”  
  
Draco sat back on the sand and stared at him. Then he said, “Teddy is young enough not to be jealous of another baby in the camp. And there is the werewolf’s daughter, if you worry about him being jealous of simply the existence of another child.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “We couldn’t create one  _now_. How long would it take us to master that dance the mummid did? Oh, yes, I think we  _can_ eventually do it. But in the meantime, Teddy would grow up, and he’ll need me more and more as he grows.”  
  
“Us,” Draco said.  
  
Harry paused, and then nodded. He couldn’t be so stupid as to pretend to ignore that. “He would need us, yes,” he said. “Both of us. And if we were busy devoting our efforts to another child? Or to  _creating_ another child? I don’t want that to happen. You said that I’ve changed because I don’t just think about protecting Teddy anymore, and that’s true. But I think more about him than about some hypothetical future child who might never exist.”  
  
*  
  
Draco leaned back on his heels. He hadn’t expected this opposition from Harry, at all. He had thought Harry, longing for a family who would be  _his_ in a way that Teddy and the Weasleys couldn’t be, but bonded to Draco—  
  
 _And I would never let him sleep with someone else, no matter how much he wanted it._  
  
—would leap at this chance. It was the only one he would have, more than likely, to create that family.  
  
But he understood more as he thought about it. Harry still saw Teddy at the forefront of his obligations, with Draco and his friends probably right behind. Teddy and his friends were the only ones he had bothered to tell that he was leaving the camp, the only ones he’d bid a personal farewell to, unless one counted Andromeda in the good-bye that he’d given Teddy.  
  
And he wasn’t willing to do something that Draco wanted if there was the slightest chance it would disoblige his godson. Which showed that Teddy still belonged in Harry’s heart ahead of Draco.  
  
Harry rolled his eyes, catching his thoughts. “Not that way. What I mean is—Draco, you want to do this, after seeing the mummid do it.” He leaned forwards and linked his fingers in front of him, the way that some of Draco’s more annoying professors at Hogwarts had. “But do you want a child, or do you want to do something that would give us more mastery of the wild magic?”  
  
Draco narrowed his eyes. “I had wondered what would happen to me when I left our world and went to Hurricane. I wanted an heir. I wanted a child.”  
  
“With no Manor and no vaults to inherit?” Harry asked him quietly. “I didn’t know that. You want a child completely independent of everything the child would have inherited back in the wizarding world?”  
  
Draco rustled his fingers through his hair. For once, Harry was the one making the bond between them as clear as stagnant water, and Draco was the one with his emotions buzzing around in his head like maddened bees.   
  
“I want to do what they did,” he said. “I want to perform that dance. And it solves the population problem, you know that. I’d looked at the number of men and women in the camp—and my aunt and the matriarch are probably too old to have more children—and wondered what we were going to do.”  
  
Harry’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I wanted a safe place for Teddy to grow up. I never wanted a particular kind of colony. I always assumed that, if we didn’t have enough numbers to survive on our own, we’d find and join up with the other people who came to Hurricane. We might have done that already if not for this.” He swept his fringe aside to tap his scar.  
  
“So you would be all right if everyone died?” Draco said.  
  
“I would be all right if we don’t become a self-sustaining population on our own,” Harry said, staring at him. “I want kids, yes. I have Teddy.”  
  
Draco rose to his feet and circled around the fire. He handed one of the creatures he’d killed to Harry. Harry took it, his hand closing around the brightly-colored body and squeezing a little, as though he wanted to wring water from it. His other hand closed around Draco’s wrist and squeezed it with some of the same pressure.  
  
“If you want to do it, later,” Harry said quietly, “when you’ve thought about it, and whether you want a child or just to do the magic, then I’d be willing. But right now, I think we’re too confused and I worry too much about Teddy.”  
  
Draco looked down at him. “Have you considered that he doesn’t need  _that_ much protection?” he asked, the words arising from his frustration as much as true belief. “That he has an aunt and a cousin and the rest of the camp?”  
  
“Yes, I have,” Harry said, and his mind didn’t change.  
  
Draco forced the fish into his hands, and stalked away. Without Harry, he couldn’t fly, but he could cut the water and the sand and the grass on the cliffs that reached down to the edge of the ocean, and that would be enough.  
  
Harry, wisely, let him go.  
  
*  
  
Harry leaned back and waved a hand in front of his nose.  _Phew._ The smoke from the roasting fish turned pink and purple as it rose into the air, and had a certain oily tinge to the fumes, but Harry could have lived with that. When he’d mixed medicinal potions for Teddy’s bad fever last year, not trusting the Healers to do it correctly when so many of them were in the pay of the Ministry, he’d had to deal with worse concoctions, and grease covering his hair and robes that made Snape look like a model of cleanliness.  
  
But the  _smell_. It was worse than oil. It was worse than fish, for that matter. It penetrated into his nostrils and reached out as though trying to tug his brain through them. Thick, rotting, like burned milk and outdated eggs and curdled cheese all at once.  
  
“That experiment wasn’t a success.”  
  
Harry blinked and looked up. Draco stood next to him, head bowed as he studied the fire. Harry shrugged and floated the fish off the fire, laying it carefully down next to the ashes—Draco would probably still want to save it—as he called breezes to blow the smell away.  
  
“I’m not hungry enough to eat it right now, no.”  
  
“You know something about hunger.” Draco scraped the fish up from the sand with a neat motion of those invisible claws, and deposited it in a pouch that he appeared to have conjured from nowhere. Perhaps he had, Harry thought. He could still do things like that, having control of his wand magic as he did.  
  
“Yes.” Harry met his gaze evenly. “A lot of people do.”  
  
Draco seemed as if he would respond, but then he simply pinched his lips together and shrugged. “So you don’t want to argue about the mummid’s ritual right now, and you don’t want to roast fish. Let’s go explore the ocean.”  
  
Harry grinned and stood up, knocking more sand over the fire. “You have the best ideas. Well,” he had to amend, thinking of some of the ones that Draco had come up with in the last little while they’d been bonded. “ _Some_ of the best ideas.”  
  
Draco punched him sharply in the shoulder, and Harry staggered, still grinning. Then he called the winds. They came to him at once, unlike the way they had responded when the mummid were using them for the ritual.  
  
That made Harry wonder. If there was a finite amount of wild magic in an area, and it all depended on what winds were blowing at the moment, what might they be able to create during a storm, if they could stand up to the punishing force? Or near the sea, where the winds were stronger and where the mummid had come instead of remaining in the grasslands?  
  
Or during a storm near the sea?  
  
Harry would have to think about it later, though, because the breezes came dancing in, prancing like badly-trained horses, and he had to give most of his attention to controlling them, and ignoring the way that Draco watched his back.   
  
*  
  
 _He has strange ideas about what Teddy would mind. And about what I want._  
  
But because he could hardly start the argument again right now, when Harry was all that held him suspended above the waves, Draco turned his attention to the ocean instead.  
  
The wonder, the hunger, the joy, was only waiting for him to do that. It burst forth again, inside his heart like a flower, and Draco held out his weapons and swept them down, watching the glittering colors that poured from them as they briefly punctured the water, the small and intense fountains. This water was thicker than Earth water, he decided, and more reluctant to move out of the way when one wanted to put something in.  
  
 _Something to keep in mind if we ever want to build ships and sail on it,_ he told Harry.  
  
Harry sent back a burst of confused acknowledgment. He was aiming towards a large shape off-shore, Draco saw when he looked up. He had assumed it was a rock when he first saw it, but from the shadow it cast on the water and the gold that covered it, it was an island, overgrown with the same kind of grass that made up the plains.  
  
Draco watched the coast, which was rocky, and entertained himself by thinking that it bulged like his Aunt Andromeda’s nose, and maybe she would like to have an island named after her. Then he saw something else.  
  
 _Harry?_  
  
The same absent-minded burst. Draco stared at the shadow racing on the waves, the shadow that was not them, and was no giant bird in the air above them, either, which the winds would have warned Harry about.  
  
But it  _was_ keeping pace with them.  
  
 _Harry_ , Draco said more firmly, and measured the distance between the water and his body with a careful glance. For the first time, he regretted that he could only cut winds and drop lower, most of the time, instead of fly upwards.  
  
Then the shadow swirled towards the surface, and came out.  
  
It  _jumped_ out, with a powerful flick of its tail, and its body was long grey sleek skin and coils and wildness. Draco, dazed, stared at the fins that expanded from its body, unfolding and unfolding and unfolding. Now they were the membranes of a dragon’s wings, chopping at the air and carrying the creature higher. The body in the middle was narrow, pointed, with an arrow-shaped, flat face that expanded on the bottom, too.  
  
Into teeth.  
  
It was like a cross between a giant shark and a giant snake, and it was headed straight for him.  
  
Draco lifted his hands, still with the shock thundering in him almost too hard for remembered defense, and then a cyclone slammed into the creature and sent it flying backwards into the sea. It hit hard enough to cleave the surface almost down to sand, but it bowled over and charged again, sliding easily through the water, and was up in a few seconds, its wings once again unrolling from its fins.  
  
Harry’s wind hit it from both sides at once this time. Draco, perforce hovering because the wind that carried him had stopped moving forwards, turned his head.  
  
His mouth dried up. He got to stare, and got to watch, as Harry Potter went forth to battle for  _him_ , for the first time.  
  
Harry skated around the creature, upright but with his body twisting in ways that it wouldn’t on a broom, his feet braced on one invisible hump and then another. His hands moved, and moved again, and Draco could coordinate their movements with the blows against the shark-snake by squinting a little. Harry couldn’t cut the way Draco could, but he could wield blunt instruments, and he did it with marvelous efficiency.  
  
The shark-snake was by now completely focused on Harry, trying to thrash its way towards him, the winds creaking up and down with the effort. Draco shook off his wonder and thought it a good time to strike.  
  
His hands moved in a complicated pattern that felt like spells he had learned so instinctively that he could only show them to someone else in slow motion, not explain them. That particular trait had frustrated Pansy quite a bit when he was trying to tutor her in Charms.  
  
And the shark-snake fell into three neat sections, head and middle with the wings and coiling tail, chopped apart by invisible guillotines.  
  
The blood bathed Draco, and created a floating, moving spot on the water so thick that it didn’t shred apart under the waves for long minutes. Draco laughed, and licked his lips to get the taste out of his mouth, and laughed again, a noise that sounded like the howl of a werewolf to him.  
  
When he had managed to bat the drops out of his eyes and shake his head, he saw Harry floating in front of him. Some blood had got on his shirt and chest, Draco saw, but otherwise, he had escaped. Well, of course, he hadn’t been flying as close to the creature at the time.  
  
Harry reached out and drew his fingers slowly through the blood on Draco’s forehead, smoothing it back into his hair as though it was a new kind of gel. Draco tilted his head into the touch, riding with it, not letting Harry withdraw even when he showed signs of wanting to wipe his palm off.  
  
“Wow,” Harry whispered, and nothing else.  
  
Draco leaned forwards and kissed him with the taste of copper still strong in his mouth. Harry kissed back, snaking his tongue around like the coiled body, and Draco glanced past the edge of his mouth down at the chopped pieces of meat that still floated. The head had sunk, but the wing-fins and the tail, perhaps because of the magic that made the creature able to fly, had stayed on the surface.  
  
“We should take that back with us,” Draco whispered. “As proof of our adventures.”  
  
Harry didn’t ask how they were supposed to do that and keep it from rotting, or why they would need proof when the Weasleys already knew what their sister had found. He raised the winds instead, and the body and tail floated back to the beach.  
  
“Do you want to go on to the island?” he asked when that was done, his gaze on Draco somber and gentle, as though he was still living through the moments when the creature could have bitten Draco in half. “Or back to the shore?”  
  
Draco smiled. “I used my magic to kill the thing, but your magic makes me fly. Are you too tired to support me?”  
  
Harry grinned back fiercely. “No.”  
  
Draco nodded. “Onwards, then.”  
  
And they went, with the winds, Draco thought, if it wasn’t his imagination, playing more closely around them than before. Well, perhaps the winds liked victors, things they could celebrate, Draco thought tolerantly.   
  
He could have asked Harry and made the perception perfectly clear to himself, but he preferred to keep his delusions, if this was one. Surely he was allowed some reward for what he had just done.  
  
*  
  
Harry knelt down in front of the stone and narrowed his eyes. He could hear Draco on the other side of the island, stripping some more of the silver flowers that they’d found. Harry reckoned the seeds had blown across the water to land here.  
  
Most of the island was covered with grass, although rocky beneath and on the sides, with only a fragile layer of soil that could grow things. Harry had wondered if perhaps they should move their camp here, because an island would offer more defenses than hills, but there would be the problem of building ships and taking them across the water when there were creatures like the snake-shark lurking in the sea.  
  
But these rocks…  
  
They were shattered and crumbled, as though something heavy had stepped on them. Or glaciers had ground them, Harry decided, remembering Muggle science classes from long ago. On the other hand, this was Hurricane, not Earth. Perhaps there had never been glaciers here.  
  
Harry picked up a small pebble, lying beside a pointed shard of stone, and sniffed it. Then he scraped at something dried and golden on the inside of it. He’d thought the gold was just a thread of mica or ore buried in the rock at first, but he no longer thought that. There was a raised and clinging strip of it above the grey rock.  
  
It came undone when he scraped at it, and he sniffed it again.   
  
 _Shit._  
  
It smelled like yolk.  
  
Harry stood up and stared around, remembering the way the shadow hadn’t started to follow them when they took off from the shore, only when they approached the island. What if this was the place that snake-sharks hatched? The last thing Harry wanted was to be standing in the middle of a rookery.  
  
“ _Harry_.”  
  
That was a summons intertwined on the mental level and aloud, and Harry jumped before he began to run. Draco wasn’t far away, and Harry thought he should save his flying strength to get them off this island.  
  
Draco was crouched down near the waves, on the one place Harry had seen so far where the island came gently down to meet the water instead of falling in small cliffs, and he moved back when he saw Harry. His face and mind were both pulsing and pale.  
  
In the water in front of him drifted a severed human hand.


	7. With This Hand

Harry immediately looked at the wrist of the hand, even as he used his winds to pluck it gingerly from the water and hold it up in front of his eyes. Yes, it looked as though something had gnawed it off, the way he had thought. There was bone sticking out from the wrist, and slivers of mangled flesh.  
  
“How can you stand to look that closely at it?” Draco mumbled behind him.  
  
Harry blinked and looked at him. Draco stood with his arms wrapped firmly around himself and his eyes closed, his mind so thick with disgust that Harry reached out and ran a hand down his arm from his shoulder. Draco had killed well enough since they came here, he thought, but seeing a human dead was something else again.  
  
“We have to know how they died,” Harry said quietly. “And who they were, if that’s possible. Not one of Primrose’s group or ours, but that’s all we can say right now.” He turned the hand over, and then shook his head. He had hoped there might be a tattoo on the wrist, or a ring, or something else, but any evidence like that had been worn away by the water or the teeth of the creature that had killed it.  
  
“You’re so  _casual_.”  
  
Harry touched Draco’s shoulder again, trying to ground him by rubbing back and forth, although he had to admit that Draco had a reason to flinch away from him as long as the hand was nearby. “Just practical,” he said. “Just trying to find out. The more we know about this person, the better we can keep our own people out of danger.” He crouched down and studied the beach again. “Did you find lying it here, or was it bobbing in the water?”  
  
*  
  
Draco had to clear his throat several times before he could respond. He didn’t know how Harry could  _stand_ it, to hold the hand of someone who had been living a short time before, and look casually around the beach for some sign of what had caused it, instead of running away to vomit.  
  
Then he reminded himself that Harry was holding the hand with wind and not his own hands, and that helped him turn around and come up with the memory of how he had seen the hand in the first place, and what he had done when he realized what it was.  
  
“It was in the waves,” he murmured, nodding to a place where the water curled up to the edge of the beach. Harry immediately walked over to study it. Draco shuddered and told himself that Harry was not going to fall in and drown, or fall victim to whatever had eaten the person whose hand they’d found. “Caught against a rock. It looked like it’d been there for a long time.”  
  
“Not with the dried blood on it,” Harry pointed out in a distracted tone, his eyes on the sky now, instead of the sea. Draco didn’t know why, when the most dangerous creature they had seen since coming here was  _definitely_ a water-dweller, but Harry’s mind flashed images of birds back at him. “That wouldn’t last with the waves battering it back and forth. The blood would flake and come off eventually in the water.”  
  
Draco grimaced, but nodded. “Then it was the color that made it look as though it had been there for a long time. At first, I didn’t believe it was real. I thought it was some form the wild magic might have taken to batter our minds into submission.”  
  
Harry hummed beneath his breath. “The wild magic on Hurricane doesn’t work like that, I don’t think,” he said, leaning forwards and bringing his face closer to the waves than Draco was comfortable with. “It wants to change people, but it also wants them to use it, and it wants new creatures to be born. It would destroy people riding the storm out of carelessness, but not because it was malicious.”  
  
Draco rolled his eyes. “Clearly you’re the expert. My mistake.”  
  
“I think I know a lot about wild magic when I’ve wielded it since before we got here.” Harry turned around and stared at him.  
  
“That was  _Earth_ wild magic, not Hurricane’s.” Draco stepped closer to him, his hands clenching with the impulse to reach out and punch or claw the smirk off Harry’s face. “Don’t you  _understand?_ We’re at the mercy of the wild magic here, and it could do whatever it likes. That’s why so many wizards have hated it in the past and decided that they would rather use wand magic even though it meant that they’d never be as powerful. They couldn’t  _stand_ the threat of what would happen if the wild magic worked on their minds.”  
  
“Why are you angry at me?” Harry whispered. The winds around him seemed to carry the sound further than they should, and Draco laughed hysterically, hoping they would do the same thing with  _that_ sound, too.  
  
“Because  _I’m frightened,_ Harry,” he said flatly. “And you’re looking at this as if it’s just another mystery, like the ones you solved at Hogwarts, when to me, it means  _someone died_ and the same thing could happen to us.”  
  
Harry blinked, once, and then nodded. “Sorry,” he murmured. “I just thought—we’ve faced death already, and you didn’t react like this when it was the snake-shark. I thought you wouldn’t be bothered by finding someone’s hand, either. Hurricane has killed so many of the people who came here.”  
  
“I didn’t find the bodies of the people Primrose was talking about,” Draco said. “And this is a hand. And I don’t think the shark-snake ate this person, because I saw its mouth. It wouldn’t leave this small a part of the body behind.”  
  
Harry paused. Then he said, “You’re right. Unless the hand came so near the shore that it couldn’t follow without beaching itself?” He turned around and looked at the slope of the sand up to the beach as though trying to estimate how much water the snake-shark would need to thrash its way back out to sea.  
  
“I don’t know,” Draco said. “I think it might try, and its fins might let it fly in.” He didn’t really want to talk about this anymore. He wrapped his arms around his chest again and turned away, feeling extremely cold.  
  
At once, Harry was there, wrapping his arms around Draco’s waist in return and murmuring into his ear. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how much it was upsetting you to hear me talk like that. I’m sorry.”  
  
Draco was silent, although he smoothed his hands around Harry’s arms and sent back a pulse of acknowledgment so that Harry would know he’d accepted his apology. But he couldn’t help asking, “How  _can_ you treat it so casually? I know death frightens you. The first thing you thought of when Primrose came and told us about the bird killing her people was that the bird might kill Teddy.”  
  
“I’ve seen enough of it that it doesn’t bother me the way it does other people,” Harry mumbled. “And the rest—well, yeah, anything that happens to Teddy bothers me. Or anything that happens to you. I just didn’t see that this time, I was the one causing you to feel bad.”  
  
That didn’t constitute an answer as far as Draco was concerned, but Harry  _had_ fought a war and been willing to abandon the wizarding world for the sake of living in a wild, dangerous, magical world with no guarantee that he would survive past a few weeks. Perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that he was a bit fucked-up.  
  
Harry laughed into his ear and stepped away from him. “That’s a better explanation than any I’ve come up with for myself,” he said. “Now, can you stand to help me look around for the body, or would you rather stay here?”  
  
Draco swallowed again to calm his stomach, and nodded. “I’ll come with you,” he murmured. “I would rather be with you if we find trouble.”  
  
Harry leaned in and kissed him, light and fast but no less a salute for all that. “Thank you,” he whispered against his lips. “Let’s take to the air. I think we’ll see the patterns of the currents better from there, and unless the killer was a bird, then we can defend ourselves better against hunters.”  
  
Draco nodded. He was happy to let Harry take charge for the moment. He was limp and shaking still, and he had to keep his eyes turned away from the hand as they took off.  
  
But Harry didn’t try to reproach him for it. He did glance back at Draco from time to time, to make sure that he was resting comfortably on the wind, and Draco could smile at him and let him know the effort was understood and appreciated.  
  
*  
  
Harry bent his head and stared at the large rocks that guarded the entrance to the beach, then sighed. It seemed he would have to give up hope that the killer hadn’t come from the sea. A snake-shark could fly over those rocks, and so could a wizard on a broom, but he could see signs of approach on the stone, where a person with two feet had climbed over.  
  
 _A person with two feet,_  Draco said to him, the words stinging and leaping like lightning.  
  
 _The mummidade are people too, but they have four feet,_ Harry said, studying the marks. It looked as though someone had walked on the rocks for a pretty good distance, from a sandbar that lay off the island’s north shore. There were little scores and dints in the stone, and small white marks that might come from someone’s hands scrambling for a hold. Harry did wonder why the wizard hadn’t used some spell to make the journey easier, but perhaps this was as well as they could have done without a broom.  
  
 _You don’t make much distinction between us and them. You can accept them as people._  
  
Harry looked up, blinking, and turned his head, even though he already knew how Draco looked hovering behind him from the pressure of the wind against his body. There was another of those undercurrents in Draco’s mind and words that he didn’t comprehend.  _What do you mean? Of course I can accept that they have intelligence and we’re allied with them. After the ceremony we watched them perform, I think we can acknowledge that they love their children, too.  
  
Wizards wouldn’t think of magical creatures like that, back on Earth. _Draco met his eyes deliberately.  _But you were always more open to house-elves and centaurs than most wizards I knew back on Earth. And that half-giant._  
  
Harry shrugged with his shoulder high. He hated thinking about Hagrid, who had begged Harry not to leave, tears streaming down his face. Harry had asked Hagrid to come with him to Hurricane, but they couldn’t have got Ministry permission for all his creatures, and Hagrid wouldn’t leave them.  _It’s probably just because I didn’t grow up in the wizarding world and absorb all that nonsense about them._  
  
Draco said something else, but Harry didn’t hear it. His head had snapped up and to the side.  
  
At all times, he kept a cocoon of scouting winds rippling around him, seeking out information in a steadily widening spiral. Back in camp, they would keep an eye on Teddy and Andromeda and let him know if there was anyone in danger or an unusual scent coming from anywhere. But so far, they had told him nothing about the sea that he had not noticed for himself, and he had almost ceased to pay attention to what they said, even though he kept them moving.  
  
Now, they told him of a broom’s magic somewhere over the sea to the north.  
  
 _Someone is coming,_ Draco said, and Harry honestly wasn’t sure whether he had made his mind up about that from watching the expression on Harry’s face or if he’d snatched the edges of the thought from Harry’s mind.  
  
 _Yes, they are,_ Harry said, and turned to the side, balancing against the wind, as he felt what the air was telling him. Coming closer and closer, instead of flying further away, which he thought likely if they had spotted him and Draco.  _Do you think you could conjure the illusions of brooms beneath us?_  
  
Astonishment from Draco was bursting white and gold, edged with small sharp shapes like arrows that struck to the sides of Harry’s vision.  _Why? What good would it do?_  
  
 _Because it would reassure them that we are flying with brooms, and not on our own,_ Harry said, half-cautious. He had thought Draco would agree immediately, and he turned to face him again, although his attention remained on the broom drawing near.  
  
 _Why should we hide our wild magic? Let them see how well we’ve adapted to Hurricane. It might make them more likely to want to join us, if they see that we can resist the influences of the storms._  
  
 _I don’t want to frighten them,_ Harry said softly, head still twisted. There was a panting silence from that direction now. The magic waited, but it had stopped moving. The rider probably had seen something that frightened them, Harry thought. Perhaps they would flee now, and Harry would lose track of them.  
  
 _They can bloody well deal with the reality that we live with._  
  
Harry glanced at Draco. That sounded more serious than he had expected Draco to be about the issue. But he was floating with his arms crossed and his emotions still diving and swooping around his mind, which Harry had to accept meant that he was serious, he reckoned.  
  
“Maybe they can,” he said. “Would it be such a big deal to conjure the illusion for them right now, though, and get them used to the other things we can do later?”  
  
 _Yes._  
  
Harry half-smiled. Draco was making a point by speaking to him through the bond at the moment rather than aloud, and not a subtle one.  
  
 _All right,_ he said. The winds had told him the broom had begun to move again, the bristles scraping against the breeze, riding them, stirring them, irritating the wild magic that danced on Hurricane with the assumption of wizardly control over its power. Harry wondered if Draco had done that before he acquired his own magic. Or perhaps some of the people they had left behind in the camp were doing it still.  _Then we should at least try to face them and look as welcoming as possible.  
_  
There were a number of wordless uncomplimentary mutters in the back of his head at that, but at least Draco let his folded arms fall to his sides. Harry nodded and faced the newcomer, noting with one part of himself that Draco’s disgust and revulsion at the sight of the hand had faded entirely. He had no dislike of welcoming someone who might be a threat to them, as long as they were alive.  
  
 _As long as we are together._  
  
Harry reached out without looking and sent a breeze to ruffle Draco’s hair. Draco’s claws sliced apart the air beneath him in retaliation, and Harry tumbled several meters before the next wind caught him. It had happened too quickly for him to feel fear. He ended up shaking his head at Draco and facing the distant broom instead, his hands closed into tight little fists at his sides.   
  
The broom appeared, and Harry squinted. It looked as though only a single wizard rode it, though it was one with black robes whipping so hard around it that Harry found it difficult to tell how big the person was, if they were male or female, and how old they were. The broom pulled up immediately at the sight of them, as Harry had thought would happen.  
  
For long moments, they sat there. Harry silently called some of the loose winds to him and set them rotating between his palms so that he could get a better glimpse of the figure. A woman, almost certainly, sitting so straight on the broom that it made Harry’s own spine ache. Long grey hair hung down her back, and her hands were straining around the broom. Harry got the impression that she wasn’t a very good or natural flyer, and he wondered why her encampment had sent her out to look for whoever had died.  
  
 _She might be the only one they have left._  
  
Harry nodded in response to Draco’s assessment, and that seemed to decide the woman. She flew cautiously closer, her eyes snapping from one to the other of them in a way that reminded Harry of McGonagall. Lucky that there were no points to take or detentions to assign here.  
  
 _Teddy will never go to Hogwarts._  
  
Harry had known that before, of course he had, but it still struck him more strongly than it had. He swallowed hard. The woman seemed to note it, eyes narrowing in thought before she leaned forwards along her broom and spoke.  
  
“Who are you?”  
  
Draco’s mind glowed again, and Harry gestured once, silently pulling him up to Harry’s eye level. Draco touched his hair, which billowed, and the woman’s eyes widened in recognition. “Draco Malfoy, at your service,” Draco said, with the shady drawl that Harry had thought he’d left behind.  
  
 _Shady?_ came the word like a flung bomb from Draco’s mind.  
  
 _I can think what I want, at least,_ Harry thought back, and gave the woman a resigned smile, brushing back his fringe to show his own recognizable symbol. “Harry Potter,” he added. He grimaced as the woman’s eyes rolled back in her head and she nearly slumped off the side of her broom, setting up quick walls around her to catch her if she fell.  
  
 _You can’t think what you want without me objecting to it._  
  
Harry snorted.  _Good thing that I never mentioned that as a condition, did I?  
  
_ The woman had recovered herself by now, and she drew the broom closer. The wind whispered to Harry about how easy it would be to block its flight, to hold it, and her, at a distance. Harry tightened the grooves the wind ran in and nodded to the woman. “What is your name?”  
  
“You wouldn’t know it,” she said, never moving her eyes from his scar. Harry dropped his hand, and his fringe swished back into place, but that didn’t alter her gaze. Harry’s eyes were starting to water from the sheer effect of being stared at.  
  
“Be familiar with it? No. Know it now? No.” Harry offered her a temperate smile. “But that’s no reason not to tell us.”  
  
The woman said nothing, now studying the way he hovered on the air as though she assumed he had an invisible support she would be able to cut. Harry felt a feral shiver travel through him, but didn’t know if it originated in him or Draco.  
  
 _Kill her._  
  
That was Draco’s voice, not the voice of the wild magic, as Harry had thought it was for one shocked moment.  _What?_ He turned his head towards Draco, wanting to see his face, glad of the excuse to look away from the woman’s stare.  _What in the world—  
  
Down!_ Draco cut the wind beneath Harry at the same moment as a curse sizzled towards him from the woman’s wand.  
  
Harry tumbled, cursing aloud, and yelling silently at Draco that he could have taken care of  _himself_ , and that he should leave the mastery of the winds to Harry, and trust that to save Harry next time. But by the time Harry had got control of this fall and soared back up to the height he had been at at first, Draco and the woman were trading fast spells, Draco cutting his winds to fall, the woman adjusting her broom with breathtaking skill. Harry wondered how he could ever have thought she wasn’t a natural flyer.  
  
 _Stop wondering and_ help me!  
  
Harry started, remembered that Draco could only go lower and not higher without Harry’s help, and returned to the battle with a blast that both lifted Draco like thistledown and bowled the broom over. The woman recovered at once and fired another curse, but Harry was there this time, rising behind Draco, covering them both with a shield of dancing wind, and wondering if they would be able to explore  _anywhere_ on Hurricane without immediately stumbling into danger.  
  
*  
  
Draco would have to be closer to make sure, but he thought he recognized that fighting style, the way the woman swept her arm around to curse them, and in particular the bright purple and green edge to the magic, there and then gone, flaring around the beginnings of her spells, remnants of a curse she had suffered from Aurors during the first war.  
  
This was Helen Rasatis, a Death Eater like his father when the Dark Lord was first rising. She had claimed to be under the Imperius, and had used up most of her money persuading and bribing the Wizengamot to let her go after that. Draco had never seen her at the Manor when the Dark Lord had his inner circle there save once or twice. She had been out of favor in the second war, he thought, not least because without her money, she was much less useful to the Dark Lord than she had once been.  
  
She had never been tried after the second war; there were too few witnesses to her activities, whatever they had been. Draco had forgotten about her.   
  
And here she was, and apparently she still had enough loyalty to the Dark Lord left to try and destroy his destroyer.  
  
Draco could feel the frustration rising in him, building in him, as he thought about that. They ought to have left the rivalries and frustrations of Earth behind when they came to Hurricane, but they had not. His aunt still hated him, the Weasleys still blamed him, and even he and Harry had had to struggle harder than they should have when the wild magic bonded them.  
  
But this was the first time he had seen someone hate Harry so fiercely.  
  
He hated it, in return.  
  
He lifted his hand, bristling with claws. He wanted to stick them through Rasatis’s body and destroy her that way. He wanted to bring her  _down._ He wanted her to go away and  _stop bothering them._  
  
He reached out, his claws flexing, and then Harry was in the way, so suddenly that Draco jerked back, badly startled. Harry shook his head at Draco and caught his arm, cradling him close, while doing something with his other hand that made Rasatis’s broom spin end over end and drop her. Rasatis shrieked in rage, but other winds caught her and held her as if in a net.  
  
“No,” Harry whispered. “I’m flattered, Draco. I like it that you want to protect me. But we need her alive so we can get answers.”  
  
Draco shuddered once, and pulled the rage back into him. It helped that Harry was right  _there,_ manifestly still alive, his skin warm and his heart beating and his breath tumbling fast and faster out of his lungs. He nodded and leaned his head on Harry’s shoulder.  
  
“Good,” Harry whispered, and turned to Rasatis.  
  
Draco followed, silent but for the hammer of his heart, and the echo of Harry’s thoughts in his head. He was going to make the woman pay for nearly destroying them. If he had to leave her alive, he would, but she was going to pay for disturbing his peace.  
  
And he would enjoy it.


	8. Desires of the Mind

“Are you mad? We can’t take her back to the camp.”  
  
Harry glanced in Rasatis’s direction, and then relaxed as he remembered the Deafening Charm that Draco had cast on her. She wouldn’t hear anything outside that humming net of air Harry had around her; she might not be able to hear that much inside it. She stood with her hands braced out in front of her as though her nails, if not her palms, would tell her the way through. She wore the tender, puzzled expression Harry had sometimes seen Hermione wear when a problem proved harder than she’d anticipated.  
  
In this case, of course, what she wanted to figure out was the solution to the problem of escaping the net of air and killing him.  
  
“I don’t see what else we can do with her,” Harry said. “We can’t kill her.”  
  
Draco was still. Well, his body was. From his direction came hazy purple clouds, and black lightning, and wheeling patterns like his own winds, all of which, Harry knew, centered on the idea of being able to kill Rasatis, and not feeling remorse for it.  
  
“You don’t deal well with death,” Harry said, and filled his mind with an image of the severed hand, keen enough to make Draco flinch. “Do you really  _want_ to kill her? I mean, for yourself? Can you cut her throat, or even use the Killing Curse on her? It would be quick, and painless, and she wouldn’t be able to block it.”  
  
Draco closed his eyes and turned his head away. “Damn you,” he said, voice so toneless that Harry felt more than a little sorry for him.  
  
“Yes, I know,” Harry told him quietly. “Sorry. But still, you want to kill her because she tried to kill me. You could do that in the middle of battle, I know. I’ve seen you shred the bird and chop the snake-shark apart. But a human is different, and I think you would regret it later.”  
  
Draco shuddered, hands clasped in front of him and twisted until Harry thought he would break his fingers. Then he said, “But we can’t take her back to the camp. There would be a riot. We don’t have the resources or the time or the space to devote to keeping a prisoner.”  
  
Harry sighed and bowed his head. They sat like that, him slumped over his knees, Draco with his back turned to Rasatis and his eyes fixed on the ocean. Draco’s hands worked open, shut, open, shut. Harry shuddered and licked his lips. The emotions burning through their bond were the kind that would probably make it impossible for him to sleep at night.  
  
Because Draco was right.  
  
They couldn’t keep Rasatis prisoner. They had enough trouble keeping everyone working together, and they would strain the working atmosphere by being away for this long. Perhaps, if they moved to the ocean, everyone would cooperate for long enough, caught up in the new adventure, but a Death Eater would mean whispering and pointed looks at Draco and too much time spent in watching everyone else’s back.  
  
If Rasatis escaped, which she might, then they would be in worse trouble, particularly if she had come to Hurricane with other Death Eaters. Harry didn’t think that was likely; most of them were in Azkaban, like Lucius, or had wanted to stay in the wizarding world and claw some respectability back for themselves instead of starting all over. But one or two in the group sympathetic to her and set against Harry would give them more enemies.  
  
Killing her would give Draco nightmares. Harry had already caused enough of those.   
  
And he—he could live with killing. That wasn’t the same as saying that he liked it, or rejoiced in it.  
  
He climbed abruptly to his feet. He could feel Draco’s stare freezing him between the shoulder blades as he approached Rasatis’s bubble of wind. The air around him turned sharp as he called in more winds, binding them to rotate around his body, lift his hair, make his robes flap.  
  
 _Do you know what you’re doing?_ Draco’s voice cut through his head, hard and curious.  _I know you’ve never tried to do something like this before.  
  
I didn’t know that I could fly, either, or support someone else, until I tried it, _Harry replied.  _At least I’m on the ground for this._  
  
Draco was silent, in the bond and aloud. Harry listened to the mingled sand and pebbles crunching beneath his feet as he approached Rasatis, but he did pause before he lowered the curtain of wind that surrounded her.  _Would you mind taking off the Deafening Charm? She needs to hear the threats I’m going to make to her if they’re going to do any good._  
  
Silence, again, but Rasatis abruptly turned towards him and said an audible curse, moving her hand as though she could command the magic without a wand. Harry smiled and nodded to Draco, and then settled his shoulders back into place. He could feel his own mind changing, a burning cold settling into place. He had felt this once before, when a more determined reporter than usual had broken into his home and threatened to hurt Teddy if Harry didn’t give him “just five minutes of his time.”  
  
 _You never said you did that.  
  
You never asked, _Harry replied.  _Content yourself with searching through my memories for more instances of me threatening people, if you want to._  
  
He waited until Rasatis was focused on him, and lowered the wind around her.   
  
*  
  
Harry had held the reporter at bay with a wand against his throat, and described, in soft and loving detail, all the things he would do to the  _reporter’s_ children if the man didn’t leave Teddy alone, Draco discovered as he searched through more of Harry’s mind and new memories bobbed to the surface like twigs revolving in the current.  
  
Harry had gone to war for the wizarding world. Then he did it for Teddy. He was capable of dragging his entire chosen family along to a new world for Teddy’s sake.  
  
Now he went to war for Draco’s sake, so that he wouldn’t have to kill Rasatis or live with the knowledge that Harry had killed her.  
  
Rasatis rocked in place as the wind dropped, and stood for a moment with her hands over her ears as though she expected the deafness to come back. Draco watched as she stretched her limbs carefully against any chance of a restraint, and focused on Harry’s pocket, where he was keeping her wand.  
  
She didn’t look at Harry’s face, and she should have, Draco thought. What burned in those intense green eyes made him want to flinch, and  _he_ could feel the mental bond flowing patience and gentleness along to him, reassuring him that Harry would never do something like this to Draco, giving him all the help he needed to believe it.  
  
Rasatis charged, the sand springing up around her feet. Harry let her get within a meter before he lifted his hands and clenched them on either side of his face.  
  
Rasatis went to her knees, screaming. Draco didn’t think he could have told what had happened without access to Harry’s mind along the bond, although he did see her hair whipping back and forth. Harry had created drills of wind and pressed them into her ears from either side.  
  
Harry held them there until Draco thought his own eardrums would be abraded by the way she was screaming. Then Harry clenched his hand down, and the winds dropped away. It took longer for Rasatis to quiet. She turned her head around and stared at Harry with eyes so wounded that Draco couldn’t resist snickering. She had expected a hero, and got someone who had been through the wars instead.  
  
Harry lounged against air, his arms folded and his eyes never moving from Rasatis. Draco had to admit he was (reluctantly) impressed. Harry looked surprisingly natural like this, in the pose of torturer and Dark wizard.  
  
He wondered if that was another reason Harry had left the wizarding world, because he was afraid of what he might become if he didn’t.  
  
 _Too perceptive by half,_ Harry said, in his head, dry and precise, in deep contrast to the soft, damp tone he was using with Rasatis as he said, “Do you know what will keep me from doing that again?”  
  
Rasatis stared at him and shook her head. Draco didn’t have a bond with her, to knew what she was feeling, but he could imagine it from the way that the emotions trembled in his own head. Indignation, fury, and pain, all purple-red.  
  
And dread, in tones of pale blue that infected the limbs until she couldn’t stand. Draco didn’t blame her. He wouldn’t have been able to, either, in her position.  
  
“If you answer every question we have,” Harry whispered, and leaned towards her. Rasatis flinched back, but it was wind that Harry used to touch her, sliding around her neck and up to her lips. Rasatis flinched again, and licked her lips as though that could get rid of the taste. “About who’s with you, about why you came in this direction, and about who the hand belongs to.”  
  
“The hand?” Rasatis’s voice was bleak and soft, but at least Draco couldn’t read any tension in her muscles that might indicate she was about to launch herself at Harry.  _Now,_ anyway. If he didn’t keep impressing her, she would probably move, and might get herself killed for her troubles.  
  
Draco wanted to shake her for that.  _The Dark Lord is_ dead.  _What are you going to do to Harry that will be worth the price?_  
  
He felt a flicker of acknowledgment from Harry’s direction, but Harry never took his eyes off Rasatis as he floated up the hand on a current beside him. Rasatis clenched her own hands in front of her when she saw it, as though she assumed Harry was in the habit of chopping off the limbs of those who displeased him. “This one,” Harry said. “We found it drifting in the water off the shore of the island. Where did it come from?”  
  
Rasatis coughed as though someone had tried to drown her. “You expect me to know someone from a mangled piece of flesh alone?” she asked. “Sad to say, I don’t study the people around me that closely.”  
  
The bond had shut down, Draco thought for a moment. Then he realized that there were emotions coming through them, but they were all cold and smooth and pearly, not the sort of thing he normally associated with Harry at all. Draco moved a careful, shuffling step backwards, although Rasatis was focused so hard on Harry by now that he doubted she noticed.  
  
“Yes, perhaps you might have recognized it better if it included a bit of the left forearm,” Harry said, and Draco would never know how Rasatis didn’t wince from the bite of those words digging into her. “But you came in our direction for a reason. Were you fleeing from your people? Chasing the one who left this hand behind? What was it?”  
  
“A free woman owes no explanation for her movements,” Rasatis said, in a way that proved she had forgotten the pain Harry had caused with his wind against her eardrums. “And you aren’t the Ministry, and this isn’t the wizarding world, for you to demand an account of my movements.”  
  
Harry made the smallest of gestures. Draco locked his hands and his teeth, waiting for the moment when Rasatis would writhe on the sand in agony again.  
  
But this time, Rasatis’s hands went to her throat and chest, although no winds appeared there that Draco could see, and he hadn’t felt any winds brush past his ears, either. Instead, Rasatis simply looked puzzled, and then began to claw. Her mouth was open, but Draco could hear no sound coming from it.  
  
“Yes, you see now,” Harry said. His eyes were narrowed, and Draco could feel nothing from him. He thought of the way that the Dark Lord had rejoiced when he’d angered Harry, and shuddered. Yes, perhaps it made sense for the Dark Lord to rejoice. Hot rage was nothing compared to this cold shutting-down of emotions. “I have wild magic that rides the wind. That rides the  _air_. And any air is mine to command. Including the air that fills your lungs right now. If I say that it won’t move, it won’t.”  
  
During all the time he spoke those calm, measured words, Rasatis’s clawing had grown more desperate. By the time Harry finished, she was sprawled on the ground, beating on her chest with weak fists. Harry smiled at her.  
  
The smile made Draco close his eyes.  
  
 _You don’t need to torture her anymore,_ he told Harry over their bond.  _I think she gets it now. I think—I think everyone gets it now. And I don’t like the way that it makes you feel where you’re touching my mind._  
  
Harry cocked his head, and then said,  _But I need to make her so afraid of me that she won’t lie in response to any question I ask. And that’s not easy, not with someone as hardened as she is._  
  
Rasatis was trying to speak, or scream, or breathe, and she could do none of them, because all of them would have required breath in her lungs. Draco put his hands over his eyes and said,  _If you won’t do it for her sake, or for yours, then do it for mine. I can’t stand to watch what you’re becoming._  
  
He felt the sharp spasm from Harry’s emotions, his own lungs jumping, before he gave in and let Rasatis go. She ducked her head almost in the ocean in her desperation to breathe, rolling back and forth, sobbing and still clawing at the air.  
  
“Shall we try this again?” Harry asked at last, his voice deadened. “With you giving me the answers I  _want_ , instead of trying to pretend that you’re too big and bad to be scared of me?” Rasatis would never know from his voice that he had given in to Draco instead of simply letting her go before she died, Draco thought.  
  
Rasatis tried to speak, winced, and then said, “Yes. Yes. Ask me the questions. I’ll tell you what you want to know.” She closed her eyes. There was a faint, suspicious wetness rimming them.  
  
Draco thought that at Harry, who shrugged and replied,  _She’s probably also a competent actress. She would have to be, to get away with maintaining any kind of status among the Death Eaters._  
  
 _I think this is real,_ Draco said, just managing not to snap. He didn’t like what this was doing to Harry, and he wanted him to believe Rasatis and ask the bloody questions so that they could decide what to do with her and hurry up and leave already.  
  
Harry didn’t shrug, but Draco felt the mental motion from him that was the equivalent of it. He kept his attention all on Rasatis, and asked, “Why did you come to this island in the first place?”  
  
“I was looking for someone who did flee from me,” Rasatis whispered. “He’d been causing trouble all along. The group I’m with chose me as mayor of our little town— _fairly_. He kept insisting that I must have used the Imperius Curse on them, that no one would willingly elect a former Death Eater.”  
  
Draco moved his mind back in a shrug when Harry looked at him.  _I have to admit that I can understand his point-of-view._  
  
Harry gave back a flicker of laughter, and the bond between them turned warm and daffodil-yellow. Draco didn’t duck his head and close his eyes in gratitude, but only because he had better self-control than that. At least he thought he could make out a gentler tone when Harry asked Rasatis, “Did you try to kill him, then?”  
  
“No,” Rasatis said, and her voice chilled despite everything. Draco shook his head. He didn’t think she was a good actress, as much as unbelievably stubborn in sticking to her own opinions. “I merely drove him out. Then someone said that they’d seen him on a broom over the ocean. I didn’t believe it. We only have a few brooms.” She looked towards the one that she’d ridden, which Harry had set hovering in another bubble of wind near the edge of the shore. “But it was causing trouble in the camp, and so I came to investigate the rumor.”  
  
“Then how did he die?” Harry whispered. The sky boomed in answer to him, as winds rose and circled over them. Rasatis started and clapped her hand over her face as she squinted towards the sun. Draco was glad that she didn’t notice him doing almost the same thing. He hadn’t known Harry could cause  _that_ reaction.  
  
“I don’t know,” Rasatis snapped. “I came to find him, that was all. And yes, he was a colonist from our camp, and his name was Arnold Mothen.” Draco could feel Harry engraving the name in his mind. “But he was stupid to go off on his own, anyway. There are dozens of creatures here that can kill or eat humans, and we’ve found none that are  _good_ to eat.”  
  
Harry smiled at Draco, the wild lightning-smile that Draco couldn’t help but return, and said, “And why did you try to kill me, if you have put your past so far behind you that you find it outrageous for someone to accuse you of using the Imperius Curse on others?”  
  
Rasatis started hard, and her hands scattered the sand as they flopped around her. Then she shook her head and muttered, “Trying to kill someone outside my colony is one thing, but I want to protect and lead the people inside it.”  
  
“You could have died in the battle,” Harry said. His words pressed on Draco, at least, as hard as his drills of wind had pressed on Rasatis’s ears, and he winced and hoped that she would respond quickly, so they could move away from this and back into territory that was comfortable for both him and Harry. “When you saw us flying on the wind instead of using brooms, you had to know that we were in command of magic that you didn’t recognize, magic that could have hurt you. Why would you attack in that situation?”  
  
Rasatis was silent. Harry slid his finger across his lips, and she immediately gasped for air. “I can’t—can’t tell you what you want to know if you deprive me of air to speak,” she wheezed, head bent and back heaving.  
  
Harry sighed and reluctantly let his hand drop. “You said that you would answer my questions freely,” he murmured. “Why is this the one that you balk at?”  
  
Rasatis bent her head and stared at the sand for a moment. Harry stirred, but Draco caught his eye and shook his head. Harry raised an eyebrow, then nodded back in recognition. Draco thought Rasatis would answer the question if they gave her time, but she probably had to think about her own response.  
  
“I didn’t know you escaped,” Rasatis said at last. “I thought the Ministry had captured you at the gates when you caused the windstorm. And to know that you were here, on Hurricane, and that you probably wanted to eliminate all former Death Eaters…”  
  
“I have a former Death Eater’s son at my side,” Harry said. “I know you recognized him. I saw it in his face. What else made you attack?”  
  
Rasatis looked as if she wanted to beat on the sand with her fists, and only the decorum of an adult witch kept her from doing so. Then she leaned forwards and said, “It’s one thing to accept him, and another to accept adult Death Eaters who participated in the Dark Lord’s slaughters and massacres. Once you knew about us, I thought you would hunt us all down, and the life we had here would be no different than the one we’d tried to escape.”  
  
“So you decided to make sure that I would have a motive by attacking me first?” Harry laughed quietly, and this time Draco felt the breeze against his face, but he wasn’t sure it was an improvement, given the way Harry was looking at Rasatis. “That makes no sense. I believe you, but it still makes no sense. Unless you’re too paranoid to live.”  
  
“She is, in a way,” Draco said, because he didn’t want to witness Harry’s own paranoia making him torture the woman any further. “It would have been sensible for her to leave an enemy alone, and not alert you to what she was by attacking you. We could have passed each other by, and you would never have seen the Dark Mark on her arm.”  
  
Harry nodded. “That’s also true. Your defense looks more and more unlikely, Rasatis. What do you say to this?”  
  
Rasatis was silent, sitting bolt upright with her breath churning in and out of her lungs. Harry watched her, and said nothing. Draco would have liked to shake her shoulder and make her realize the danger she was in.  
  
But even more, he would have liked to shake Harry’s and make him admit that there was no reason for him to act this way, except that he wanted to.  
  
 _I want to make sure the camp is in no danger!_  
  
A flickering sting from Harry’s mind. Draco winced under it, but accepted it.  _No,_ he answered.  _You want to make sure that she’s no danger to you, or me. We’re the only ones here at the moment, and there’s not much chance of her finding out where we came from. But you can’t stand it. She attacked you, and you can’t stand not knowing why._  
  
Harry paused a moment, and then, perhaps because he could see the reflection of what he looked like in Draco’s mind, he accepted the answer and turned back towards Rasatis as if he was going to tell her that.  
  
But Rasatis had already started speaking, and there was so much resentment crushed down to a powder in her words that Draco felt like holding a hand up in front of his face for his own protection.  
  
“You destroyed my life,” she said. “There was no sympathy and no tolerance for us after the war. You destroyed the Dark Lord, and the chance that my allegiance would win me power and wealth in the wizarding world. Every time we got a break, you were there, talking about your orphan godson and how much we’d cost you, and the mood would turn against us again.”  
  
Harry was silent, looking at her. Then he turned to Draco and said, “Draco, will you  _Obliviate_ her? Make her remember that there’s something across the ocean that is frightening and will destroy her if she comes here again. Maybe a snake-shark. If I’m near her for one more moment, I might forget myself and do something drastic.”  
  
“You’re just as good at violence as any of us, then,” Rasatis began.  
  
Harry turned around, and  _roared._  
  
The sound flattened Draco to the sand, and did the same thing to Rasatis, though from the way she squirmed and cried out, it was with a heavier hand. There was power in that sound, and more menace. It  _hurt._ It was the cry of a great storm, and it had all come out of Harry’s body. Draco could just imagine the way it had been bottled up.  
  
When he could look again, Harry was gone, rising further down the beach, tossed into the sky and cradled by his winds. Rasatis was still pinned and whimpering, and Draco knew from touching the bond that Harry had left enough winds to ensure that she was no danger to Draco.  
  
He picked up his wand and turned around. He was sure he could perform the Memory Charm to satisfaction, with such motivation driving him.  
  
Just as he was sure that he and Harry needed to talk, and extensively.


	9. Children of the Ocean

Draco had done a good job of the Memory Charm, he thought, and of the murmured threats. By the time that he Apparated Rasatis to the rocks that surrounded the island, the ones Harry thought the dead man had clambered over, she was shaking and had her eyes clamped shut and her hands clamped within each other.   
  
 _That’s one skill I picked up from being the Dark Lord’s torturer, at least. I can threaten people just fine._  
  
 _Don’t put yourself down that way._  
  
Draco stood there for a moment before he turned his head and saw Harry hovering on a current of air so thick Draco could almost see it above the sand. The sand, and the trash and pebbles and grass that made up the parts of the beach that weren’t sand, was blowing and shifting in circles and eddies, stinging Draco’s skin.  
  
Thanks to the bond, though, he would have  _known_ if Harry was really trying to shut him out. He stepped towards him and tilted his head instead.  _Are you done having a tantrum? Are you ready to talk about this?_  
  
There was a sharp hiss, and Harry dropped down with a rush that made Draco’s feet ache in sympathy with the way he landed. Harry didn’t seem to notice the pain, just the way he hadn’t noticed the depth of the pain he was causing Rasatis, or the fear he was causing in Draco. He strode towards Draco and reached out, resting his hands on his shoulders, his eyes so bright and intense that Draco had to remind himself of his resolution to talk to him.  
  
 _What do we need to talk about? I can feel your emotions, and you can feel mine. That’s better than words, as you keep trying to tell me._  
  
Draco ground his teeth, but kept his voice calm. “Even having a bond doesn’t prevent us from having misunderstandings. And there are some things that only words can do. I want to speak to you aloud.”  
  
Harry stared at him. Then he sat down on the beach and said, “What would you have had me do instead? I  _had_ to frighten her enough to be sure she would tell the truth, without even trying to lie. And even then, you saw how far I had to go to make sure that she wouldn’t just take back her promise later.”  
  
Draco shook his head. “I don’t question what you did so much as the way you did it.” Harry looked at his wand as though to remind Draco he could have done worse with curses, but Draco interrupted him. “With that cold look on your face and that flatness in your emotions. _That_ was what frightened me, not that you wanted to protect me or punish Rasatis. Of course you wanted to protect me, but you shouldn’t have done it that way.”  
  
Harry said nothing for long moments, staring out at the sea. Then he said, “That’s how I have to do it. Otherwise, I—sympathize with them too much, I think. I start thinking about how they feel, trapped and helpless, and the way I would feel in the same situation. So I have to make myself cold, and I have to reach down to the part of me that still hates Voldemort and everything he stands for.”  
  
Draco kept himself from flinching at the name, because right now, he felt it would go too far towards proving Harry’s point, whatever exactly that was. “Is that the same part of you that you used when the reporter threatened Teddy?”  
  
Harry blinked at him. Then he said, “Well, no. Because the reporter wasn’t a Death Eater.”  
  
“But I felt your memory,” Draco said softly. “I felt it when you went cold like that, then. You can do something like that in defense of other people, but when you’re fighting for yourself, it doesn’t matter as much. You were angry because Rasatis might have killed me and might have killed Teddy if she’d followed us back to the camp, or found it. You weren’t angry because she fired curses at you.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “Would it somehow be more justified if I felt angry about that? Or angrier? Because,” and he fell silent, and shot a globe of humming power down the bond to Draco.  
  
A globe of humming  _anger,_ too, Draco realized, as he closed his eyes in order to feel it better. It was bright, and had all the real emotions and warmth that he’d been missing when Harry went cold like that. Draco held onto the globe for a few minutes, savoring it, before he opened his eyes. “No,” he said. “It wouldn’t excuse going cold. But it would be more understandable.”  
  
Harry rose to his feet and paced back and forth beside the waves. Draco wondered if he would fly away again, or send another answer through the bond, to save himself the trouble of answering with words. But other than a narrow glance at him when he heard Draco thinking those thoughts, Harry didn’t react with anger. He simply said, “I don’t understand why I can’t get angry enough to protect other people. You didn’t want to torture her, and you outlined the arguments against keeping her prisoner pretty well. Why is it so frightening that I get angry?”  
  
“You’re too strong,” Draco said.  
  
Harry closed his eyes for a second, as though someone had told him that before and he didn’t want to hear it. And that was enough to trigger a rain of memories from his direction that told Draco that was exactly the problem. The Ministry had told him he was too strong to leave the wizarding world and emigrate to Hurricane, because he would cause problems there. His friends had worried about the way he was depending on his wild magic and giving up his wand even before they’d emigrated. Andromeda had sometimes hinted to him, gently, that she was worried about the way his magic might act around Teddy. And even his friends had given him long, considering looks after the day when he’d frightened the reporter.  
  
“Glad to know that it’s true, then,” Harry said, without inflection, the feelings in the bond between them thinning and flattening and vanishing again, as he hunched his shoulders and walked away to turn a pebble over with his boot. “After all, you have access to my mind and you know the way I think and feel and react, so if you think I’m too dangerous ever to get angry, then it  _must_ be true.”  
  
Draco groaned. Harry turned and looked at him. His face had gone that way Draco hated again, distant and cold, and he looked as if he would listen to Draco without giving a fuck about what he said.  
  
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Draco said. “I’m talking more about—about the way you roared at her, at the end, and the way you forced yourself to do something I know you hate—” He stretched out his hand in spite of himself, because Harry was withdrawing without moving a muscle. “No, I didn’t mean that, either. I’m not afraid of you.”  
  
“Yes, you are,” Harry said softly.  
  
Draco grimaced.  _Futile to try and hide from someone who knows everything I feel the minute I feel it.  
  
Yes, it is, _Harry snapped back.  _I’m surprised you tried it, because most of the time, you’re more sensible than that._  
  
Draco rolled his eyes. If he couldn’t find relief for one set of feelings, then he would find it for another. “I mean that I’m not frightened you would pick me up and drop me from a thousand meters, or press your drills of air into my ears,” he said. “I’m not frightened of you losing control around me, or Teddy. And I think my aunt is stupid for fearing that. You’ve done everything for him.”  
  
“What, then?” Harry had at least taken a step towards him, and looked a  _little_ more interested.  
  
“It’s,” Draco said, and searched his mind, and found nothing, so blurted out the first words that showed up in his mind and meant  _something_. “I’m afraid that you can shut yourself down like that and you’re trying to be the calm and perfect leader the rest of the time. I think you ought to take a  _holiday_ , and show your anger in less extreme situations so you feel more like a human.”  
  
“Thus losing my ability to threaten our enemies,” Harry pointed out, with impatience that danced down Draco’s back like spider legs. “Some people have the talent for torture. You don’t, and that probably makes you the better person. But if it protects other people and protects the camp, why does it matter if I use it?”  
  
“Because it affects  _you_ ,” Draco whispered back.  
  
Harry blinked. “I don’t like having to do it, if that’s what you mean.”  
  
“Yes,” Draco said, glad that he had found what he wanted to say, even if he didn’t think Harry would take it the way Draco wanted him to. “I don’t like the way it affects you, and I don’t like the fact that you feel you have to wrap yourself in that cold shroud anyway.”  
  
Harry frowned and looked at the waves again. The emotions playing inside him had diminished, but not in that frightening way they had while he was torturing Rasatis, so Draco kept quiet and watched. Harry was trying to understand, he thought, picking his way through the various emotions Draco sent flowing his way and thinking about them.  
  
“You think being cold like that harms me.”  
  
Draco snorted. “You want to prove that you’re  _still_ better than I am by rephrasing my thoughts?”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes at him. “I know you know I don’t believe that. But you believe the first thing I said.” He fell silent, and gnawed at his lip until a small trickle of blood ran down and Draco hissed in annoyance. Then he said, “If I told you that I don’t mind, that I can do that to protect you and Teddy and my friends and everyone else I love?”  
  
Draco smiled because Harry had said his name first this time, and got a glare in return. But he nodded. “I don’t care if you don’t mind. You didn’t mind the way that everyone else leaned on you when we came here at first, either, until I pointed out what a bad idea it was. But going cold is still a stupid idea. It’s still something that I think you don’t need to do. We can deal with our enemies in a different way.”  
  
“Name one other thing that we could have done with Rasatis.”  
  
“Promised alliance to her and then  _Obliviated_ her once she had told us more about where her group was and how big it was,” Draco said promptly.  
  
Harry blinked at him. “You didn’t come up with that when I was torturing her.”  
  
“Not at the time, no,” Draco said. “But we could have waited. You had her secure in a prison of wind. What  _did_ push us to make up our minds so quickly?” He was thinking, trying to remember why he had thought they needed to eliminate or do something else with Rasatis immediately, but the thought process was clouded by his memories of what Rasatis had turned into immediately after.  
  
“I don’t know,” Harry said, his mouth drawing down. “Yes, that was a possible solution. I’m sorry I didn’t think of it on my own.”  
  
Draco made a rude noise that he’d last heard when Harry refused to let Teddy stay up past twilight. As Harry pivoted on his heel to stare at him in astonishment, Draco glared back, and also sent thoughts sizzling down the bond between them that made Harry stagger.  _You idiot. You’re taking on more guilt over something you didn’t do. If you should have thought of it, so should I. You said that a minute ago. Why are you taking it back?_  
  
Harry reached over his shoulder to scratch a place in the middle of his spine that Draco knew for a fact didn’t itch, but he didn’t take his eyes off Draco. “If I set myself up as a leader, then I ought to act like one, don’t you think? That includes accepting the blame and doing something about it.”  
  
Draco rolled his eyes again. They were starting to hurt from being mistreated, but what else could he do when Harry was playing the idiot?  _You are trying to move away from that,_ he said, still speaking through the bond because that would give him more intimate access to Harry’s mind, and remind Harry of what he felt without any possibility of disguise.  _I know that. I’m glad. But that means you can’t become the lone and suffering martyr, either. Unless those are the only two roles that you know how to play?_  
  
 _I’m also a good godfather,_ Harry snapped back.  _And a good friend, and a good warrior, and_ excellent  _with wind magic.  
  
None of those roles includes taking on guilt until you collapse under it, _Draco said.  _You don’t have to do all the hard things, all the time, because you think there’s no one else to do them. Most of the time, you don’t give anyone else the_ chance  _to do them. I’ll concede that I didn’t want to be the one to do something about Rasatis, but if we’d waited and thought it out, we could have come up with something together._  
  
And from the way Harry paused, Draco knew he’d found the right words, at last.  
  
*  
  
Harry passed a hand over his eyes, and wondered if Draco knew what a relief the words were to him, how much he had  _wanted_ to put his burden down and find some way to live normally.  
  
 _I know now._  
  
Harry turned and smiled at him a little. “You do,” he said. “Thank you.” He hesitated, then added, “And do you think I can use my magic to protect you and Teddy without it bothering you, or do I need to pick my wand back up?”  
  
Draco gave him the same kind of complicated grimace he had already worn several times during Harry’s explanation. “I think you need to control your magic better,” he said. “And remember that you can frighten people as much with show as with the actual substance of the magic itself.”  
  
Harry nodded. “I’ll remember that. Thank you.” He was beginning to feel a little silly with the simple words, as if he could find something deeper, something that would express what he was feeling better than he had so far. Draco simply sat and watched him, his legs crossed beneath him. Harry coughed and cleared his throat. “Is there anything else you wanted to talk to me about?”  
  
Draco shook his head. “I  _Obliviated_ Rasatis. I don’t think the information we could gain from her is worth going back and finding her again, or disrupting the Memory Charm.”  
  
“Obviously not,” Harry said, staring at him, only to receive another snort. “Okay. So I’ll try to restrain my magic, and I’ll concentrate on important things.” A thought almost made him leap then, and turned him towards the island. “I never told you about the eggs I found there.”  
  
“What eggs?”  
  
Harry grinned in sympathy at the strained note in Draco’s voice, and pulled the smashed bit of pebble that he’d found out of his pocket. “Look at this,” he said, holding it out. “I know it’s shaped like a pebble, but doesn’t the yellow stain on it seem like yolk to you? Look, it comes off if I flake it.”  
  
Draco stared at the bit of shell, and then swore creatively and reached out to take it. Harry let him turn it over and sniff at the yolk on the inside of it the same way Harry had. When Draco looked up, his face was grey.  
  
“I had thought it best if we moved our camp nearer the ocean,” he murmured. “Here, we would have water, and the desalination charms that Johnson mentioned didn’t sound as though they would take  _that_ long. But if there’s creatures like this hatching near there…”  
  
Harry nodded. “Not to mention that the snake-sharks might come nearer the shore in order to take prey. We don’t know that much about their habits yet.”  
  
“And we aren’t likely to learn, if they devour all of us the minute we move here.” Draco looked again at the piece of egg, and then handed it back to Harry. “If that one attacked us because we approached the island, it could also mean that they protect their nests, and we could end up with another one chasing us if they laid eggs and we didn’t know about it.”  
  
Harry nodded again. “Not to mention that they can fly. They might be able to lay eggs on the island and then leave again, and if they came at night, there’s no reason we would know it. But  _they_ would, and start attacking us again. You and I have the ability to survive something like that. Someone like Ginny on her bird might, too. But Hermione, or Ron, or Teddy, on a broom? No.”  
  
Draco frowned and bent down over the sea again, letting the sand run through his fingers for a moment. Then he straightened up and turned around. “I’m hungry. Do we still have enough of that rabbit meat that we could make a meal?”  
  
Harry was surprised by the hunger that stirred in his own stomach, until he remembered they had barely eaten since that morning. He nodded, and turned towards the place where he had made the fire to test how the fish smelled when it cooked. It seemed so long ago, but then, they had made enough discoveries today to weary someone with a heart more inclined for adventure than his was.  
  
Really, he would have been content to stay quietly in the camp by this period of his life, but he needed to know the creatures of the world and the dangers they presented if he was going to keep Teddy safe.  
  
 _This period of your life,_ Draco said, making it silent to sting.  _As if you’re a doddering old man and Teddy’s your grandson._ A pause.  _As if you didn’t have the possibility of more children of your own._  
  
Harry pushed back rejection, and then paused and looked around. The winds had died. He wondered for a minute if the mummid herd they’d seen dancing the young one into being had come back and required the magic again for another ritual.  
  
But then he saw the eyes watching them from the edge of the ocean. He moved back towards Draco, his hand reaching out to brush Draco’s. Draco gave a shallow nod, and Harry knew from the slight bristle against his back that Draco’s hands had grown those necessary, invisible claws.  
  
The eyes were blue-green, the color of the turquoise beads that Tonks had left Teddy as one of her treasures. They floated nearer the shore. Harry couldn’t see anything around or under them, and that made him wonder if this creature was part of the water.  
  
The waves leaped up silently in the next moment, and answered his question. Yes, the eyes were like stones floating on top of the water, but another body was rapidly shaping under that, one that had foam for hair and long, wavering edges of ripples for limbs. In a moment, the figure had formed into one that looked human, and it stood on the sand with its feet slapping into and out of the water, and stared at them.  
  
Harry clenched his fists. Had the Unspeakables who’d come here made a mistake after all? Had they missed human inhabitants of the planet, perhaps Hurricane’s own version of wizards?  
  
But then he shook his head. He thought the creature was only forming a body in imitation of them, beings it hadn’t seen before. Even as he watched, the bend of one elbow became sharper, straighter, instead of the smooth curve it had been so far.   
  
“Yes,” Draco whispered back to him, and then moved forwards. His hand swept out. Claws sliced the human-looking body in half at the waist, and the water leaped up, splashed, and came down exactly where it had been before, with only a small interruption. The blue-green eyes shifted to Draco, but Harry could make out no recognizable human expression in them.  
  
“What did you do  _that_ for?” Harry snarled back, and tried to call the winds towards him, to surround them both with a protective, rotating cocoon. The creature took a step back into the sea at the gesture, but didn’t seem any more afraid or upset than it had when Draco cut it. “What were you  _thinking_?”  
  
“I wanted to see how it would react,” Draco said, and smiled at him. “Isn’t it nice that it doesn’t seem to be aggressive?”  
  
Harry stared at him, then shook his head and faced the creature again. He wondered if it could communicate with them along mental bonds, the way that the mummid had learned to do. He tried to push his magic towards it, in some way that didn’t involve loosing his winds, tried to think of it as having a mind. Could he locate that?  
  
There was nothing there when he reached, though. No notion of a paired mind, the way all the mummid had to have before they could call themselves a person and begin to speak. No stir of wind in response to his wind, which he might have thought would happen because of the way the winds had died when the creature appeared. No chance of—  
  
Harry narrowed his eyes, and used some wind to splash the water near the creature’s heels.   
  
The creature turned around at once, broke the surface with fingers that elongated easily, in a creepy way, and splashed some more water back at him.  
  
Harry grinned.  _So the key to communicating with it lies in the sea._  
  
 _I don’t know if we want to,_ Draco said back to him, along the bond.  _If it imitates whatever we do, then at some point it’ll probably try to fly, or have sex with us, or kill people._  
  
Harry had to roll his eyes at that.  _As if I wanted to have sex on the beach, anyway. Sand would get up my arse and leave you no room to put your cock in.  
  
There isn’t _that  _much sand around here._  
  
The sea-creature had spent the time they were communicating looking back and forth between them, and now it stepped out of the sea again and came towards them. Harry stiffened the cocoon of wind. Draco laughed, which made the creature stop and consider them again.  _I thought you were the one who was insisting that it was practically harmless?_  
  
 _I never said that. I just don’t want it trying to touch us and maybe accidentally drowning us. It might._  
  
Draco tipped his head, and then looked at the creature and formed his mouth carefully around the syllables of the word, “Hello.” The creature leaned forwards, focused on the movements of his lips, and Draco repeated it. The creature flowed towards them this time, its “feet” moving like tractor treads across the beach, and tried to send a tendril of water through the wind shields and down Draco’s throat.  
  
Draco choked and spluttered and jerked his head back, which was the first time Harry really  _realized_ that the attempt he’d made to shield them was futile. The creature’s water had flowed right through the wind, as if it was ordinary air.  
  
Harry must have made some motion that the creature didn’t want to imitate, because abruptly there was nothing in front of them but a few drying spots and some wet sand, and a gust of water had leaped back into the sea. Harry watched it fountain up and swallowed.  
  
“See,” Draco said mildly. “That’s an example of a time when you might want to restrain your temper for the sake of everyone else.”  
  
Harry bowed his head in response.


	10. A World Full of Wonders

“We have to decide what we’re going to tell them back in the camp.”  
  
Harry started. He’d spent an hour staring into the flames, letting them mesmerize him, which seemed easier at the moment than facing up to Draco. Half the time he wanted to defend himself based on their previous conversation, and half the time he wasn’t sure there was anything to defend himself from. That Draco had been silent most of the evening didn’t help.  
  
But this, this was something he could respond to. So he swung himself around, used one of his winds to send the smoke from the fire streaming upwards when it would have blown into his face, and said, “You mean about Rasatis? I had assumed we would tell them the truth. I don’t think there’s anyone who would want to seek her out or think we shouldn’t have  _Obliviated_ her.”  
  
“They might change their minds when they know that I was the one who cast the spell.” Draco sat motionless, with his arms around his legs, staring into the fire. In fact, he sat so motionless that Harry wasn’t sure his lips were moving at first; he had to concentrate to see them do so. “Or they might decide that if they have one Death Eater out of the camp, why not another one?”  
  
“I won’t let them do that,” Harry said. “I’ll lie, if I have to.”  
  
“Would you lie to Teddy?” Draco turned his head to stare at Harry, his eyes still as remote as the moons.  
  
“He’s not old enough to understand this,” Harry said, blinking at him. Did Draco think Harry would let Teddy make decisions that he wasn’t old enough for simply because Harry loved him? But that was one mistake of Dumbledore’s that Harry never intended to repeat with Teddy.  
  
“If he was old enough, would you lie to him?” Draco stretched forwards, although with his chest and face and not his arms, which he kept wrapped around his legs. “Would you lie to him for my sake?”  
  
“I dislike the way you keep positioning this as a choice between you and Teddy,” Harry pointed out. “I tortured Rasatis the way I did for information, but also because she tried to hurt you. Teddy isn’t even  _here_.”  
  
“I was only saying that the fact she’s here might change things,” Draco said, and this time he turned his head to stare off into the darkness beyond the fire, that of the hills where the mummid had leaped down to form their circle. “They might start wondering why they put up with me so long.”  
  
“The loss of everyone weakens us,” Harry said firmly. “We could barely afford to let Primrose leave. I would have convinced her to stay if I could. The smart ones, Hermione and Ron and George, know that letting you leave would remove one of our best protectors and best workers, and they’ll convince the rest.”  
  
“You think so?” Draco gave him a grim smile. “I don’t.”  
  
Harry closed his eyes and tried to ground and center himself for a moment. Calling up wind was the way to do that, or at least had been the last time he felt this desperately in need of it, back on Earth. He sat there picturing a revolving wheel, and only when Draco cursed and said something about sparks landing on his skin did Harry realize that the wheel was real, and had sent embers leaping out of the fire.  
  
“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered, opening his eyes and gesturing the fire back towards him, so that the wheel kept it in its pit instead of stretching outside it.  
  
“I don’t think we should tell them anything,” Draco said. “Not about Rasatis, not about the hand we found, not about the mummidade and their creation ritual. They’ll only worry and pick.”  
  
Harry stared at him in silence. “Rasatis I’ll give you, because of personal reasons and because I don’t really feel like talking about what I did there, either,” he said at last. “But why in the world should we hide the snake-shark from them? They’ll need to know about it if we move our camp to the sea.”  
  
*  
  
Draco grimaced and bowed his head, rubbing his forehead, snorting when he saw how strangely Harry looked at him. He knew that he didn’t have a scar there the way Harry did, but why should that affect the way his head hurt?  
  
He didn’t want to admit anything because he thought he and Harry would have more power if they kept these secrets. Mentioning Rasatis would be a bad idea all around. The secret of the mummid’s ability to create children could matter to no one but them, with no one else in the camp partnered with someone of the same sex, and no one else bonded by the wild magic. The shark-snake was a legitimate danger, but if the seashore didn’t sound interesting, no one would want to move there, and they could share the warning with someone else who did approach it, like the Weasley girl, later, and individually.  
  
He wanted to go back to the camp and use that as a holiday from everything they had discovered outside it, everything that was making him have arguments with Harry and everything that pressed on him with new claws and new ideas. Even the water-creature could potentially be threatening if they didn’t handle it just right. He could think of people who wouldn’t want to be told it was lurking on the beach, people who wouldn’t want to come here if they knew, and people like the werewolf who would probably try to kill it and eat it.  
  
Everything would just be  _easier_ if they didn’t tell the truth. Hurricane was wide. They could always go back to the ocean later and say they had missed something along the way. They would never have found Rasatis if she hadn’t happened to come in their direction, the hand was coincidence, and the snake-shark had only attacked them because they approached the island that, if Harry was right, was a rookery. It was doable. They could go back, and show the fish and flowers they had discovered, and that would be enough for everyone right now.  
  
But from the way Harry was slowly shaking his head, Draco knew he wouldn’t agree, even if he didn’t know why. He clenched his hands in front of him and tried not to feel as though he would snap at Harry if he didn’t get perfect agreement.   
  
“I’m sorry, Draco,” Harry whispered. “But I do think we owe them the truth about something as dangerous as the snake-shark, no matter what other secrets we keep. Rasatis—maybe it would cause trouble to talk about how I tortured her and how you  _Obliviated_ her. But I think we should tell Ron and Hermione about her. They’re more likely to understand.”  
  
“They didn’t want to know you were fucking a Death Eater,” Draco pointed out. Make it as blunt and dirty as possible, and Harry might understand the way he felt. “They wouldn’t want to know you spared one, either.”  
  
Harry blinked. “You thought that was about the Mark? No. It was about  _you_. You were the one who caused Bill’s scars, and the one who caused enough trouble for me in the past that they’re not going to accept us just being together without some kind of explanation. I never heard of Rasatis before we met her, and neither did they. They’d be angry at her for trying to kill us. They wouldn’t put you in the same category as her.”  
  
Draco did some more staring. Then he said, “You sound very sure.”  
  
Harry shrugged. “I know my friends.”  
  
“What about the rest of them? This seems like it could spark that tired old debate about whether I’m going to betray you again.”  
  
Harry was silent, gazing into the fire. Then he said, “If we need to admit everything about Rasatis and the Memory Charm, then we also need to admit I tortured her. That should give them something to think about other than what you did.”  
  
Draco opened his mouth, blinked, and then shut it again. Finally, he said, “Knowing that about your reputation could tear the camp apart.”  
  
Harry hunched his shoulders a little, but his voice was desperately, deliberately calm as he replied. “I don’t think that matters. And I don’t think it’ll happen. They—they distrust both of us, some of the time, but keeping secrets won’t help things along. Especially since Ginny’s bird will hatch, and she’ll be able to come here, too. We need each other to survive.”  
  
“We don’t need them,” Draco whispered, touching again the seductive vision he had tried to explain to Harry before, only for Harry to shut him down and turn him away. “We could live on our own, leave and live.”  
  
Harry smiled distantly. “There are times that would be nice, but I still don’t want to go without Teddy. Or Ron and Hermione. And what would the others do if we abandoned them?” He shook his head, and his eyes came clear again as he looked at Draco. “This is our world. We’ll never leave it now. The least we can do is share its wonders with the others. Maybe then, they’ll learn to see it the way we do.”  
  
Draco clenched his teeth together. He hadn’t thought Harry would take it in that spirit.   
  
Now that he had, it seemed almost childish to object.  
  
“If you’re sure,” he said. “And how much should we tell them about Rasatis, anyway? That’s the most dangerous secret we have.”  
  
Harry sighed. “We don’t have to explain everything to them in graphic detail. They probably  _don’t_ want to hear that I pressed drills of air into her ears. But we can explain enough that they know she was dangerous, and we didn’t want to bring her back as a prisoner. We already have scouts and guards on the camp, and we took at least one of her brooms, and we know that we didn’t say where we were from. That ought to keep us safe for a while.”  
  
Draco sat there silently. There was still part of him that didn’t like it, that would have preferred to keep the secrets and have the power.  
  
But he had felt contempt for the Weasleys’ ignorance when they distrusted him and Harry. If he wanted that trust, then perhaps he had to make a few steps, give up a few secrets, of his own.  
  
“All right,” he said. “We’ll do it your way.”  
  
Harry smiled, an expression of extraordinary sweetness, as the bond between them pulsed blue, like Hurricane’s sky. “Thank you, Draco. It’s your way, too, you know. You pointed out that we didn’t think of the best solution for handling Rasatis until later. You can think about it, and if you come up with something better, then I promise, I’ll listen.”  
  
Draco snorted to himself, and thought, again, that that was unlikely to happen. But Harry reached across the fire and took his hand, and Draco leaned in to kiss him, and the prospect of a voyage back to the camp tomorrow no longer seemed impossibly hard.  
  
*  
  
Harry lay awake, staring up at the dawn that seemed to come from all directions. The winds muttered and whispered around him, and he knew that a storm was building in the east—or, well, the part of the sky that he thought of as the east, because the brightest light shone from that slice of the horizon.  
  
He didn’t know if he and Draco would get home before it hit. But at least he knew riding the storm was possible now, if not comfortable. If it blew up, then he would get them back to the shelter of the hills that had protected them last time and keep them safe there.  
  
Something splashed beside him.  
  
He turned his head and stared at the long finger of water that was creeping up the beach.  
  
Harry felt his winds come down around him and form a protective cocoon even though he had issued no such command. They did it automatically, then, reacting to the changes in his mood and mind.  
  
Draco might be said to do the same thing. At least, when Harry reached out to put a hand on his shoulder and shake him, he was already awake, his wand in hand and his eyes glinting. The way he held his left hand told Harry that the claws had sprouted there, and the bond, pulsing low red and lavender, told him that Draco was reluctant to use the claws unless there was no other choice, since they had gone through the sea-creature once before without hurting it.  
  
“We’ll move  _quickly_ ,” Harry said, in a voice so soft that the air hardly carried it, and might not have if he didn’t rule the winds. “I’ll cage it and you perform a spell that affects water. We don’t know its intentions, but I don’t like the way that it’s coming. All right?”  
  
Draco said nothing aloud, but the knowledge that he was ready and consented flooded Harry’s mind. Harry wished he had more time to enjoy the agreement. They had it so seldom.  
  
But the finger of water had reached his foot, and was foaming up, growing taller, gathering strength, before sprouting what looked like clumsy imitations of human fingers and lunging for him. Harry whipped the winds forwards, and they spattered a few drops on the beach as they caught and gripped.  
  
Not much, though. This water looked more solid than it had before, more under the control of a single will. Perhaps the sea-creature had decided that simply mimicking them was no longer enough, and wanted a specimen to study.  
  
As the water twisted and thrashed like an eel, Draco struck. His wand flicked, and his eyes narrowed as he performed a nonverbal spell. Harry snorted.  _Show-off._  
  
The bond was so thick with Draco’s smugness that it was like breathing in pipe smoke. Harry coughed and choked and caught the edge of the spell as it slammed into the water.  
  
The water began to boil. Ripples of heat rose off it, the blue and the other colors in the middle that seemed to have nothing to do with reflecting the sky changed and swerved back and forth between rose and yellow and lilac, and the water was suddenly pulling back towards the sea, while other arms rose out of the ocean as though to embrace and protect it. When they tried to get close, however, they recoiled. Harry laughed.  
  
 _We must seem evil to the poor thing,_ Draco said.  
  
 _I don’t care,_ Harry retorted.  _This isn’t like the alliance we have with the mummidade. We don’t even know if we can reason with this creature, and I don’t like the way it was trying to grab me._  
  
Draco hummed in response, while Harry made a private note to himself that Draco seemed more likely to object to violence against humans than against the native magical creatures of Hurricane. Well, there were all sorts of reasons for them, many understandable, and Harry didn’t think he needed to bring it up unless it became a problem.  
  
 _I can still hear you, you know._  
  
Harry didn’t look away from the last boiling and evaporating of the watery arm, but only because he didn’t want to meet Draco’s eyes with his cheeks flushing like that.  
  
The water was gone in wisps of steam, and the other arms danced and swayed around nothing. They didn’t stop dancing and swaying, either. Harry, watching, wary both of what might happen next and of assigning human emotions to something made of water, still thought they seemed puzzled.   
  
Surely they were used to bits of water melting away and not coming back, though? It would happen every time it got hot here, and every time it rained they would have something new to contend with.  
  
Perhaps he shouldn’t think about such things when they had danger in front of them, said Draco’s sudden tension from the side, and this time several dozen arms of water materialized from the surface and reached towards them.   
  
Harry reacted without thinking. He might not be able to use his wand to cast the kind of curse Draco could, but he raised his own arm in response, and the winds blew up, racing along joyously above the surface, splattering and scattering. The arms tried to assemble themselves again, but the winds could turn faster than they could work, and came back, churning the calm surface into a flurry of waves, dancing and interfering utterly with what the sea-creature was trying to do. Harry laughed again.  
  
 _Should we laugh at them?_  Draco asked, pale and stern in his mind.  
  
 _They won’t know what human laughter means even if they hear it,_ Harry retorted.  
  
This time, though, nothing reached out of the water when his winds were done and had come back to him, dancing around his head like puppies anxious to be petted. Harry let them run through his fingers and watched the surface. Nothing. The sea-creature was watching them, perhaps, or simply waiting and pondering what to do next.  
  
“I’m ready to go home,” Harry told Draco, without removing his gaze from the water. “What about you?”  
  
Draco’s mind flickered back and forth like a sunbeam on the water, but the general conclusion was the same, Harry knew. They moved further up the beach to light the fire and eat their breakfast, and then, after Draco had made sure that he had the fish and the silver flower heads they had collected in his vials, they took to the winds and soared out of there.  
  
*  
  
 _Home._  
  
That was the song in the back of Harry’s mind as they flew, cutting away from dark areas of the sky and places where Harry could feel magic gathering in order to escape the storm he was afraid would catch them. Now and then Draco caught glimpses of faces, sometimes with unfamiliar expressions on them, that he thought were memories.  
  
He didn’t mind that, entirely. The bond between them was deepening, changing even into something else, and they would grow closer as that happened. Draco could always make use of that closeness.  
  
But what was home to Harry wasn’t home to him.   
  
Granger tolerated him. So did the original Weasley, and his sister, and maybe the dragon-keeper; at least he would work beside Draco at their mutual tasks without complaining. And Teddy loved him because he was too little to know anything about adult politics or the war that had killed his parents.  
  
But when Draco’s own aunt didn’t like him, when his first impulse about everything they had discovered near the sea was to keep it to themselves, what did that mean? And Teddy would grow up eventually, and learn about the Death Eaters, and although Harry might do his best to counteract Andromeda’s poison, she was Teddy’s grandmother. What would happen when he listened to her, when he learned that some of the people with the same Mark on their arms as Draco bore had killed his parents?  
  
 _I will be there._  
  
Draco started. Bond and all, memories and all, he was still sometimes startled when Harry responded to something he was thinking. Perhaps because Harry had been reluctant to initiate anything that had to do with the bond at first.  
  
 _I’m here now._  
  
Draco dipped his head, and flashed back the sum of what he was feeling, which was easier than trying to put it into words. He did catch a glimpse of Andromeda’s face in his own memories, so at least Harry would know which person it had the most to do with.  
  
Silence, mental silence filled with bright and dancing sparks. Draco watched the way Harry turned broadside to meet the wind, into the best flying position, and admired the way his muscles also flexed, and tried not to worry that that silence concealed something worse.  
  
 _I meant it,_ Harry said at last.  _I will be here. I will help you if Andromeda tries to turn Teddy against you—although I’m sure she would start out with the intention of driving you away, first. She wants him safe before anything else, but she’s too timid to speak directly against you if I told her to stop.  
  
I don’t know about that. If she convinced herself it was for the best, or that she wasn’t really doing that, she was just telling him the history of his parents…  
  
I know._ More silence, but this time, Draco thought, the sparks had collected into a solid bridge that connected them and bound them, through and against all the pressures that someone else could bring to bear.   
  
 _What I mean,_ Harry said at last, painfully but painstakingly, too,  _is that I’ll be there, and I’ll fight for you. There might be some of the Weasleys who think that getting rid of you is the best solution—  
  
_ Might  _be?  
  
Just like you think going off on our own is the best solution, _Harry continued, firmly.  _But if they drive you away, I go. They’ll lose me, too. And they don’t want to. And if you tried to leave when they haven’t done anything, you would have to do it without me.  
  
Would I? _Draco didn’t mean for his voice to come out low and slow and drawling, a cross between a threat and the way he used to speak when they were both schoolboys in Hogwarts together, but that was what happened.  
  
More silence, but this time charged and crackling. Then Harry said,  _Yes, Draco. In the end. If you were being_ driven  _away, then I would take Teddy and Ron and Hermione and anyone else who wanted to come and go with you. But if it was only because you wanted to leave, then I would have to stay behind.  
  
The bond won’t let you.  
  
I can fight the bond._  
  
Draco slammed back wordless frustration, beating the air like broken wings. Harry dipped his head in return, in recognition and acceptance, and then kept on flying straight ahead like none of it mattered.  _Bastard.  
  
I can feel what you feel, _Harry whispered.  _I would notice, now, the way I might not on my own, if someone was persecuting you and making you feel like you had to leave._  
  
Draco was silent in turn, shoving the silence back at him.  
  
 _But the other part of it is that if you just wanted to leave—the way you have told me you want to several times, that we can survive on our own—I wouldn’t go. Because Teddy couldn’t live that way.  
  
Teddy, Teddy, always Teddy, _Draco snarled back at him.  _I didn’t come into this bond looking for someone who would be tied down.  
  
No, you came into it because I rescued you that night and you chose to stay after that, _Harry snapped.  _Which means you’ve known from the beginning that I was tied to Teddy, that I came to Hurricane for his sake. This is_ it,  _Draco. This life, here, right now, is real. We escaped the wizarding world, but we can’t flee this. I can’t escape the bond_ or  _my responsibilities for Teddy, and the only thing I can ask is that you not deliberately try to make me choose.  
  
If someone else makes you…  
  
They’re the ones who are in the wrong, and I’m on your side._  
  
Draco was silent, wishing he could speak, wishing he could want someone who would put him first without sounding like an arsehole about Potter’s commitment to Teddy.  
  
 _I don’t think that’s a bad thing to want._ Harry’s voice was very gentle.  _And I put you first. I put you beside him.  
  
I don’t want to share that place._  
  
More silence, this time wordless gentleness. Harry knew how he felt, and was sorry, and wouldn’t change.  
  
Draco flew on, scowling. He disliked the idea that they were tied up in knots they couldn’t escape, when one reason he had come to Hurricane was in order to escape his past.  
  
But for now, this was the best haven and the best offer he was going to get.  
  
He did press one more thought down the bond between them.  _Teddy won’t always be little._  
  
No, he won’t be.  
  
And then there was a vision of glory opening in Harry’s mind: the plains and the ocean, distant and endless, full of wind and wild magic.   
  
Even knowing that vision was shared helped. Draco flew on, and was comforted.


	11. A Sort of Welcome

They made it back to the camp by that evening. Draco hadn’t realized before how fast Harry’s winds could go—and how slowly they had traveled that first time, when Harry wanted to investigate what lay between the camp and the ocean.  
  
 _No more exploring for right now?_ he asked Harry, as the hill with the stream came into sight before them, and Harry stopped them for a moment, hovering, before he cut the wind and allowed them to drop.  
  
For a long moment, he thought Harry hadn’t heard him. He was staring at the water with a ridiculous expression on his face, as soft as the dawn sometimes appeared here before expanding into Hurricane’s hard-edged day.  
  
Then he turned to look at Draco, and smiled.  _No more exploring for right now,_ he admitted, and began to spiral down in a wide circle that should get the attention of the Weasleys below as well as allow them to realize that the people approaching them weren’t enemies.  
  
Draco sniffed, and followed him.  
  
It wasn’t that he wasn’t glad to see the grass swell beneath him and the hills open up, revealing the small houses and the greenhouses and what looked like a trampled piece of ground where the youngest Weasley was probably training her bird. It was just that he would have been as happy, or happier, hunting on their own, and Harry knew it.  
  
Harry tilted his head towards Draco, said silently,  _I know,_ and then fled away from him, in the direction of the house where Teddy and Andromeda lived. Draco followed him slowly, shaking his head.  
  
 _Technically, that’s the house where I live, too,_ Harry said in the back of his head.  
  
 _But not where I do._  
  
Harry paused for a second, hovering on invisible wings, even though he could surely hear the shouts from below by now, the ones that said people had seen and recognized them. And were welcoming them, Draco thought, or at least welcomed Harry. For a second, they stared at each other.  
  
Then Harry swept his head down, said aloud, “You’re right. I should do something about that,” and dropped.  
  
Draco cut the air and fell after him, turning gracefully the way he would on a broom, and thinking. Having their own house wouldn’t alleviate all the worries he felt about the Weasleys not accepting him, all the hurt he felt when his aunt pushed him away and tried to cling on to both Teddy and Harry. And it wouldn’t lessen the longing he felt to have Harry to himself, perhaps with a child thrown into the bargain.  
  
But it would be a start.  
  
Then he was touching down, and Harry stood in front of him, swinging Teddy around and around in his arms with a blissful look in his face, while his friends crowded around him and made admiring noises as though they couldn’t believe that he had come back alive. Granger and Weasel-the-original nodded at Draco, but no one made any attempt to come over and hug him. Draco folded his arms and stood there, silent.  
  
Then…  
  
Then Harry set Teddy on the ground so he could hug his friends, and Teddy ran as hard towards Draco as his legs could carry him. Draco didn’t open his arms in time to catch him, but only because he couldn’t actually believe that Teddy was heading for  _him_. He was, though. He caromed into Draco, and Draco grunted and bent down to embrace him. Teddy laughed, and his dark hair changed to blond.  
  
“Cousin Draco!” he said. “Cousin Draco will be back.” Someone had probably told him that while Draco was gone, Draco thought in slightly stunned incomprehension, as he lifted the squirming two-year-old into his arms.  
  
 _Except, who would have, if everyone here hates you?_  
  
The thought could have been Harry’s or his own, because Draco  _did_ look up and find Harry standing there with his eyes fixed on him.  
  
But Teddy hugged him and babbled, and Draco had to pay attention to him, and to the fact that someone had missed him after all, and that he resented Teddy-the-abstraction, Teddy-the-boy-whom-Harry-placed-in-front-of-him, not the real, living, breathing Teddy who laughed up at him and changed his eyes to be grey.  
  
*  
  
Harry turned away with a small smile and used wind to float up a few of the vials that contained the silver flower-heads, purely for the pleasure of watching Hermione’s eyes widen and her hands twitch as she reached out.  
  
“These are  _beautiful_ ,” she whispered. “Where did you find them?”  
  
“This was this enormous field of silver flowers we found on our way to the ocean,” Harry said, smiling as he remembered it. It was the most beautiful sight they had seen on the way, always excepting the mummid’s creation ritual. “It seemed to respond even more to the wind than most of the grasses on the plain do. We brought parts of several back so that you could look at them.”  
  
Hermione nodded, giving them the kind of rapt look that Harry was used to seeing from Neville. Well, Neville hadn’t come with them, so Hermione would have to replace him as their Herbology person. “I think I can see a few ways now that Hurricane plants are different from Earth ones,” she murmured. “Thanks for bringing these, Harry. I can’t wait to start the experiments on them.” She lowered the vials and gave him a gleaming smile that looked better when it wasn’t distorted by the glass.  
  
“That couldn’t have been the only thing you saw,” Ron said, leaning forwards. Harry smiled at him. Ron had always been more interested in animals than in plants, although not enough to keep taking Care of Magical Creatures when the rest of them had dropped it. “Any other creatures of Hurricane?”  
  
Harry hesitated, then chose to tell them about the most harmless one. “This creature came out of the sea,” he said. “It formed itself out of water, and acted like it was imitating us. That was pretty interesting at first, but then it tried to drown Draco and reached its arm out to me when I was lying asleep on the beach this morning, so we decided we didn’t want to spend any more time around it.”  
  
Hermione was suddenly paying attention again, eyes very wide. “Did the ocean seem like a place of the wild magic?” she whispered.  
  
Harry nodded. “The winds are more intense there. And there are colors in the water that can’t come from just reflecting the sky. I don’t think  _all_ of it is dangerous,” he added hastily, because Hermione looked at the flowers in the vials with distrust. “But Draco and I had to fight one battle that could have killed us if we had less powerful magic.”  
  
“The way that everyone else here does,” Ron said, his eyes narrowed as he chewed on his lip. Harry was reminded of the way Ron looked when he was contemplating some difficult puzzle in Auror training. “We should wait a while before we move there, then.”  
  
“Is that something people were already talking about?” Harry asked.  
  
Ron nodded. “After Ginny brought back that milk, Andromeda was saying we should go.” He grinned. “I think she’s getting a little tired of seeds and meat. So am I, but wishing won’t make something so.”  
  
Harry nodded back, while his mind raced. Why hadn’t they seen any of the trees that Ginny had found? Because they had gone to a different part of the shore, of course. Once again, he felt stupid for not seeing the obvious. If they got Ginny to lead them back to the beach she had visited, then maybe they would avoid the snake-sharks and wherever the village of Rasatis’s group was. Then they could live by the ocean in safety.  
  
Well. Not perfect safety, of course. He looked over to where Draco was still listening to Teddy, and smiled as he felt the pulse of Draco’s low, contented emotions. Maybe not enough safety that he would want to risk Teddy. But there must be other places. Foolish to think the one they had found was the only one.  
  
“Harry?”  
  
Harry blinked and turned around. Ginny stood not far away, gnawing her lip like Ron had. He nodded encouragingly. “Is something wrong?”  
  
“Not  _wrong,_ exactly.” Ginny shook her head, her brow furrowed. “But the bird is starting to get bored with the rabbit meat, I think. He screams at me and throws it away when I try to give it to him.”  
  
Harry frowned. “We brought back some fish from the ocean, but we’re not sure it’s safe to eat. We should test it first. Sorry, but we didn’t see anything else, exactly, that we could eat.” He shuddered. “We killed one, though.”  
  
“What one was that?” Hermione wanted to know, speaking at the same time as Ron. They grinned at each other a moment later in what Harry knew could have been was embarrassment, but also knew wasn’t.   
  
 _Will Draco and I ever look at each other that way?  
  
Why is that particular way important? _Draco said, not looking at him, but with his emotions flowing and forming as crisply in Harry’s mind as though he was immediately beside him.  _Isn’t what we have enough?  
  
It is, _Harry said, with a pause and a touch to the back of Draco’s mind that he tried to make as gentle as possible.  _And I brought up the snake-shark. Are you comfortable with me talking about it right now?_  
  
Silence. And Draco strode towards them with Teddy and planted himself at Harry’s side, ignoring the way Ron and Hermione blinked. Blinked, Harry noticed, more and more pleased, and didn’t try to draw away or curl their lips or make disparaging noises. Yes, there was potential there, if he could encourage all of them to realize it.  
  
 _Don’t push it, Scarhead._  
  
Harry grinned, glad now that no one else  _could_ hear them, since they wouldn’t exactly understand Draco’s terms of endearment.  
  
Draco rolled his eyes at him and turned to Ron and Hermione. “That creature was one I killed,” he said. “A combination of shark and snake, and it could fly.”  
  
He’d struck exactly the right tone. Ron and Hermione leaned forwards in interest, and Teddy curled up in Draco’s arms and listened steadily, although Harry thought he couldn’t understand most of the words yet.  
  
Draco was a good storyteller, too, making dramatic gestures at the right moment and stretching the tension out by talking about how he had been paralyzed at first. He made the ending of the battle a little less gruesome for the sake of Teddy’s ears, Harry thought, but it was still impressive, and left Ron and Hermione literally gasping. Even Ginny, who had been looking anxiously back at the place where she kept her bird, was drawn in, enough to demand whether they had brought any of the meat back.  
  
“I did bring some,” Draco said, and shook his head loftily when Harry blinked at him in turn, taking a different collecting vial out from his pocket with strips of grey flesh in it. “You can think me later, Weasley,” he added, as Ginny snatched it and ran back to her hatchling.  
  
 _You’re such a good storyteller,_ Harry told him, resting a hand on his lower back and reaching out to take Teddy from him.  
  
 _You think I might be to our own children?_ Draco’s voice was sly.  
  
Harry blinked. Sometimes Draco picked up on things going on in the bottom of his mind that Harry hadn’t noticed.  _Was I thinking that?  
  
Somewhat. _  
  
Harry sighed and leaned his head for a moment against Draco’s. Hermione had hurried away with the flower-heads, and Ron stood near them with his arms folded and his gaze fixed firmly on the sky, giving them some privacy.  _Then I was thinking that, yes._ He tickled Teddy, listening to his giggles as he squirmed against Harry.  _Not that you seem to mind this one that much when you’re around him._  
  
Draco nodded and probably would have said something else, but other people were starting to come up to them, and the first one was Andromeda. She touched Harry’s arm and said, “Harry, could I talk to you? In  _private._ ” She probably meant her glance to spear Draco, and Harry could feel it doing that, but not in the way she had hoped for. Draco simply turned his back, took Teddy from Harry’s arms, and continued talking to him. Teddy squirmed to be let down, and then ran away, with Draco after him, to play a hiding game.  
  
 _It will be all right,_ Harry told Draco’s back.  _I’ll make it be all right.  
  
But what if that means alienating her as well, and making it so that you can’t see Teddy?_  
  
Harry shook his head slightly, holding Andromeda’s eyes and noting the way that she flinched when she saw the motion. She hadn’t got used to the idea of him communicating silently with Draco yet, he thought, although that had been part of the bond from the first day.  _I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen._  
  
Silence, and then trust, lapping him up and down like a lick from a warm, wet dog’s tongue.  
  
Harry felt Draco’s indignation when he noted the comparison, and then the sense of him faded a little as he and Teddy moved further away. Harry turned to Andromeda, and nodded when she repeated, “Can we talk?” Now the one she glared at was Bill, who was getting the story of how Harry and Draco had fought the snake-shark from Ron.  
  
Bill tilted an eyebrow upwards when he saw that, but nodded, said, “Good job,” in Harry’s general direction, and went back to examining the vials of fish. Harry would bet that he’d test that meat for safety before any of the rest of them did.  
  
Harry walked with Andromeda over towards the hills that sloped down near the creek. When Andromeda finally turned around, having decided they were far enough away from the others, Harry set winds rotating around them, to further scatter sound and keep anyone from creeping up to overhear.  
  
Andromeda paled when he did that, although she didn’t feel him using the wild magic the way Draco did, and so the only indication she had was the sudden pounding of air in their immediate area, and the way the fluttering breezes tugged at her hair. Harry narrowed his eyes when he realized that.  _Interesting._  
  
“I don’t think we should be letting my nephew near Teddy,” Andromeda said.  
  
A more direct attack than Harry had expected, but she’d probably had the time while he was away to work up her courage to that wording. He only nodded. “I know you think that,” he said. “But I don’t agree. Draco did what he did during the war before he was terrified—and what he did wasn’t against anyone on the ‘Light’ side, if you want to put it that way, except when he came after me in the Room of Requirement. He refused to identify me when the Snatchers brought me to Malfoy Manor. He tortured Death Eaters at Voldemort’s command. Death Eaters, not people on our side.”  
  
“He acquired a taste for torture from that,” Andromeda said flatly.  
  
Harry hoped that Draco  _did_ eventually want to tell the full story about Rasatis, because the only thing he could think of when Andromeda said that was the way Draco had cringed when Harry assaulted Rasatis with wind. “He told you that?” he asked.  
  
Andromeda shook her head. “No, of course not. He wants to fit in here, so he wouldn’t say it. But things like that leave a mark on a person.” She gazed at him with huge, earnest eyes.  
  
“So do other things,” Harry said softly. “For example, I threatened to torture that reporter who threatened Teddy. Did you think about why I did it?”  
  
Andromeda blinked. “You wanted to keep Teddy safe.”  
  
Harry nodded. “But for me to make that kind of threat shows that the war marked me, too.  _Normal_ people don’t do that.” Normal people also didn’t have reporters breaking into their house on a daily basis and threatening their godsons, but Harry didn’t intend to say anything about that for right now. “And I was showing other signs of something wrong even before we left home. I had that wind magic.” He brought down one wind in a slicing motion close to his side, and watched Andromeda.  
  
She jumped. Then she paled and wrapped her arms around herself, her eyes never leaving his face.  
  
“But you wouldn’t hurt me and Teddy that way,” she whispered. And whether she wanted it to or not, the rising inflection on the end of her voice turned it into a question.  
  
Harry turned his back and paced a few steps away, breathing deeply. Andromeda wasn’t the people who had thought he was mad simply for being able to speak Parseltongue. She had never treated him like he was anything special for the scar on his forehead, and that included fearing him.   
  
Now she did.  
  
“If you’re afraid of people with powerful wild magic,” he said, staring blindly up the hill and watching the sun glint on the water, “and people who make threats of torture, then you ought to be afraid of me, too, just because of what I am. Draco hasn’t done anything else. Teddy adores him, and you know that he’d like to get to know you, too.”  
  
“He did do  _horrible_ things in the war,” Andromeda said. “Letting in that werewolf who scarred Bill’s face.”  
  
Harry whipped around. “What he did was always  _accidental_ ,” he snapped. “As much as what I did to save the world was accidental! I didn’t  _know_ Snape had those kinds of memories that would tell me the truth about what I needed to do. I stumbled over him and his death scene by accident. I could have marched into the Forest and tried to duel Voldemort, and it would all have gone wrong! I made the right decision when I knew everything, but I didn’t know all the consequences of my actions. Draco was the same way. He let in those people because he thought it would save his parents, and not because he  _wanted_ to scar Bill’s face. At least blame him for the things he did because he knew they would happen, not for the things that got out of his control.”  
  
“He should have known better,” Andromeda whispered. “He was of an age where he could have.”  
  
“He was a teenager,” Harry said. He felt very tired, despite the energy that stirred in him and made the winds rotate. “So was I. So was almost every bloody person who fought on the front lines. Or they were adults, and they died. We made mistakes. I’m not going to deny that, Andromeda, and I see why you’re uncomfortable with him. But you should be uncomfortable around me, too.”  
  
Andromeda’s eyes shifted away from him. She swallowed.  
  
“Oh, shit,” Harry said, and sat down on the grass and bowed his head so that his forehead rested on his crossed wrists. “You are.”  
  
Andromeda rushed up to him, but halted well short of touching him. Her words reminded him of the nervous piping of a fluttering bird. “It’s not what you think, Harry! It’s not—oh, Harry, I never feared you. I never thought you would hurt Teddy. I know you love him. I know you would do anything for him.”  
  
Harry looked up at her silently, and waited for the rest.  
  
Andromeda knelt down in front of him, and hesitantly touched his shoulder. “I just think Malfoy should go,” she whispered. “If he left, you would settle down. You would be like you were before. That wasn’t horrible, was it? When it was just you and Teddy and I living together, and you put Teddy to bed every night, and sang to him all the time?”  
  
Harry shook his head. “It can’t be like that,” he said. “Not now that we’re here. It never can be again.” He looked up and into her face, and took her hand, pressing it. “Do you understand why?” he added gently. “We need to help in the running of the camp, the defense of the camp. I love Teddy, he’ll always be important to me, but I can’t spend every minute with him. I didn’t spend every minute with him even when we were back on Earth.”  
  
Andromeda let out a breath that made her tremble a little. Then she said, “Then we could go back through the gate. Back to Earth. I understand that the gate won’t let everyone who passed through it back, that—that it’s most set up to let people onto Hurricane, and nothing more than that. But we could go home.”  
  
“You didn’t want to come, did you?” Harry asked softly, gently. He felt as if he were falling down a long, long hole.  
  
Andromeda shook her head, her eyes dull and full of tears. “But you were so determined to have a new life for Teddy, and I knew I would lose you both if I resisted. So I came. But this world—it’s too strange, I’m too old to start over. I want to go  _home_.”  
  
Harry shut his eyes. Draco had warned him against taking on too much, making the burdens and guilt of the camp his, but he didn’t see any way to foist this off on someone else. It was, exactly, his problem and his burden.   
  
“I’m sorry, Andromeda,” he whispered. “I can’t make Teddy choose between his grandmother and his godfather. I’ll send both of you back to the gate, if you want.”  
  
“And you’ll come with us?” Andromeda’s hand on his arm was as strong as a chain.  
  
Harry shook his head. “There’s nothing for me back there, except Teddy, especially with the way the Ministry tried to stop me as I came through the gate. And there’s nothing for Draco. And I don’t think the bond between us would dissolve if we were back on Earth. It would just remain, and make us all more miserable.”  
  
“But you can  _leave_.”  
  
Harry looked up and smiled weakly. “No, I can’t,” he said. “I’m hanged neatly by my own rope. I want to be with you and Teddy; my love for you won’t go away, and neither will Teddy’s need for a safe home. But the bond with Draco won’t go away, either. If you feel that you have to leave, Andromeda, I can’t go with you.”  
  
Andromeda shut her eyes, and there were soft, silent tears on her face. “I can’t take Teddy from you,” she whispered. “I  _hate_ this place.”  
  
Harry simply nodded, and squeezed her hand. He had no idea what to say. They had to live on Hurricane; they had to live with the winds, and the mummidade, and the dangers of the sea, and the bond the wild magic had forged for them. They had to live with the fact of their pasts, and the disgusting things they had each done in the wars, and the dislike Andromeda had for Draco. None of it was going away. None of them could escape it.  
  
Andromeda thought of going back to the wizarding world as an escape, but Harry knew it wasn’t. If they simply assumed the life they had been living before—which they couldn’t, not with the Ministry after them—then Andromeda would never go out, would have no friends. She would simply remain in the house and sometimes join Harry in taking care of Teddy.  
  
She couldn’t escape her grief, either.  
  
Which meant they had to start facing it.  
  
Harry gently squeezed Andromeda’s hand, and went on doing so until she looked up at him. “I have an idea,” he whispered.


	12. Cousins and Aunts

"Look what I can do!"  
  
Draco laughed as Teddy splashed into the bottom of the pool and came out with both hands full of squirming, transparent creatures. They looked like worms, but only until he peered at them closely, and then their delicate jaws and the fins waving around their heads came into view. Draco let one run through his fingers, and shook his head. It felt like nothing more than water to him. Well, perhaps the scales were solid enough when he let his hand rest on them, but no more so than some of the particles that one found drifting in even the purest of water.  
  
"I'm special," Teddy said, stepping up on the bank of the pond and whipping around with his hands extended in front of him. A few of the smaller creatures he clutched fell to the ground, and Draco prudently waved his wand to float them back to the pond. Teddy seemed like the kind of child who would shriek and mourn later if he didn't, even if he was just exulting in his power to see them right now. "I can see them."  
  
Draco paused and leaned forwards. "Has anyone talked to you about that?"  
  
Teddy blinked at him, then said, "Grandma asks why I can see them." He splashed back into the water again, and came with his hands spread flat, so that Draco could see the fat animal in them. It was touched with swirling streams of gold and silver, like some painted goldfish. It gasped as Draco watched, the fluttering gills spreading out in flat fans that seemed to reject the air instead of soaking it up. "Look at this one!"  
  
"He's pretty," Draco said. "But I think we should put him back now. He's struggling to breathe, see?"  
  
Teddy blinked and peered more closely at the fish. "He is?"  
  
Draco nodded solemnly. "You wouldn't want to struggle to breathe, would you? You know the feeling you have when you climb up stairs or a high hill? That's the feeling the fish has right now."  
  
Teddy immediately turned around and cradled the fish to the edge of the pond, letting it slip in. Draco watched him kneeling there, and swallowed. Teddy could really only change the color of his eyes and hair right now, not his features, though from what Draco knew of Metamorphmagi, that would come in time. With his back turned and his head bowed, blond hair rippling in the wind like the gills of the fish he had showed Draco, Teddy looked incredibly like the children Draco had pictured having with Harry.  
  
 _But he's not them. And I don't know if Harry will ever yield if he thinks that Teddy would be jealous of another child._  
  
Draco shook his head as Teddy turned around with a snake so thin-blue and fine-boned that he could hardly see it. He had to dismiss the thought for now. Teddy would grow, and there was no reason to think they would live shorter lives on Hurricane that they had on Earth, unless the wild magic or one of Hurricane's animals killed them. They had decades, perhaps a century, to make and rear more children.  
  
 _And what inheritance will I give them, now that Malfoy Manor is gone?_  
  
The question occupied him to the point that Teddy was the one who squealed and darted out of the pool towards Harry and Andromeda, rather than Draco sensing Harry's approach through the bond. Draco turned around and stayed resting with one arm on his knees, watching them.  
  
Harry swung Teddy up and settled him naturally on his hip. Draco noticed the way that Andromeda watched that, and blinked.  
  
 _Yes, she does get jealous of me sometimes,_ Harry murmured through the bond.  _But she's more than jealous of you. She actually proposed going back to the wizarding world with Teddy, and leaving us here._  
  
Draco felt the sharp negative move through him, like a black bird, before he could control it. He didn't want to lose Teddy.  
  
Harry nodded slowly, gaze fixed on him.  _Exactly. I know that you can put up with him, and do more than that, when you're around him. It's only when you're distant that you start thinking of him as an obstacle._  
  
Draco nodded and leaned back on the slope, letting his hands fold behind his head so he could mostly close his eyes and look lazy. Harry's emotions told him how he looked and the way that Andromeda crept along at Harry's side, glaring at Draco as if she could change the way he existed, the way he  _was,_ merely with that.  
  
 _If any wizard could, then someone would have done it before now,_ Draco thought idly.  _The Weasleys would have changed me, or my parents would have when I disappointed them._  
  
 _I hate that so many people want to change you._  
  
Draco jumped a little.  _You would have wanted to do it, too, when we first began feeling bonded,_ he retorted, when he could catch his breath from the shock of Harry suddenly being in the most intimate center of his mind with him.  
  
Harry didn't bother responding, other than with a glare. But he sat down halfway between Draco and Andromeda, Teddy in his arms, and faced them.  
  
"I want you to tell her that," he said aloud.  
  
Draco rolled his head towards him, a sign of lazy attention. His aunt didn't need to know how intently his senses had started humming, reaching towards Harry.  _Excuse me? What do you mean?_  
  
"Tell her what you just told me," Harry said, still intent. "About the way that people wanted to change you, about all the arguments you've had about it and the effort you've gone to to prevent it from happening. I think it might make a difference to the way she thinks of you."  
  
"It only makes me wonder why someone didn't succeed," Andromeda said harshly, grinding her knuckles against her knee, before Draco could come up with a response either silently or aloud.  
  
"I would have to agree," Draco said. "Perhaps if I had changed, I wouldn't have taken your abuse this long without speaking out."  
  
Andromeda paled. But she didn't focus on the accusation itself, as Draco had thought she would. " _Abuse_?" she whispered. "No one could characterize me that way. I was only saying what I thought."  
  
"Listen," Harry said, glancing back and forth between them. "This is my idea. That you talk about your grief, Andromeda, because Draco might not understand it. That Draco explain why your opinion of him grieves him, because I don't think you understand the way he thinks of it."  
  
 _It does not_ grieve  _me,_ Draco said, enjoying the emphasis he could put on silent words that he never could on spoken ones, and enjoying seeing the way Harry flinched as the words seemed to rip into him, through his ears.  
  
 _It does something,_ Harry snapped back.  _Choose a different word, but I'm interested in that thing itself, not what you call it.  
  
And what will you share?  
  
The way that the war most warped me. Why I was so determined to save Teddy that I came to Hurricane for him._  
  
Draco paused. He had to admit he was interested in that--he knew the emotions, but not all of them made sense to him. He was much better at picking up emotions from Harry than memories, and he knew Harry's love of Teddy was connected to memories that Harry kept private almost as easily as if he had had training in Occlumency. And he, unlike Harry, wanted the words, wanted to hear the way that Harry put words around those memories and spat them out.  
  
The only problem was that he would have to share them with Andromeda.  
  
He had barely thought that, though, before Harry firmly squashed his protest.  _She has to hear them, too, although I suspect she'll hear them with less eagerness than you. But this bargain doesn't work unless everyone gets to hear everything, and unless all sides are equally vulnerable._  
  
Draco bared his teeth at Harry and said nothing. He was doing this for Harry, though, not Andromeda. He thought Andromeda had already explained her stance sufficiently for Draco's ears. His parents had done awful things, and that was enough for her. That it was more about his parents than him, he had no doubt. She hadn't even brought up his behavior much the last time they talked.  
  
Harry simply rearranged Teddy in his lap and turned to Andromeda. "Do you agree to this? We'll talk about things that might make us understand each other better--and  _talk_ , not wring our hands and avoid the conversation because it might make some of us uncomfortable. Do you agree?" he repeated, when Andromeda simply stood there staring at him and didn't seem to know what to say.  
  
Draco turned to his aunt. She was the one now who would have to say yes or no, and the responsibility seemed to paralyze her. He suspected he knew what she would "confess" if she chose to participate in the conversation. Anyone who couldn't make a choice shouldn't be left in charge of a child.  
  
 _Congratulations. That sounds like a slogan Hermione would come up with._  
  
Draco flashed back a picture of an extremely crude act, and felt the heat that Harry couldn't expose boiling up in the bond between them with satisfaction, before he focused on his aunt again.  
  
*  
  
Harry knew Andromeda's mannerisms, and he knew that he had never seen her so conflicted. Her eyes were darting, her hands were frozen halfway between open and shut as if she didn't know what to do with them now, and her mouth clutched the air, likewise halfway between open and shut.  
  
She wanted to hear Draco's awfulness from his own lips, Harry knew that. More than that, she wanted to know about Harry himself. But telling her own secret would mean leaving the shell she had constructed for so long.  
  
Finally, though, just when Harry was on the point of shoving her, she appeared to reach a decision, and slowly nodded, her grey-marked hair rippling around her. She sat down in the grass. "I can appreciate this," she said, though from the way her eyes didn't focus on anything, Harry didn't know what "this" it was she appreciated.  
  
And she used the conditional tense, too, Harry thought. That was something he had become very familiar with in the harsh half-year after the war, when he had still thought it was his duty to interact with more of the wizarding world than the people outside his immediate circle.   
  
He felt the stirring of Draco's interest, like a whirlwind picking up dust, but simply tilted his head at him.  _That's part of what I'll tell you, if we ever manage to get through this conversation. Do you mind going first?_  
  
Draco hesitated, then shook his head. He reached out his arms as Teddy finally got bored of playing in Harry's lap and looked around for something else to do, and Teddy ran to him at once. Draco conjured some colored bubbles that bounced off Teddy's hands, the grass, and the air itself when he reached for them. Teddy ran in a circle, laughing in delight, and spinning around to show the especially bright blue or red bubbles, his favorite colors, to Harry.  
  
Andromeda's eyes dimmed as she watched them. Harry shook his head. If it was to the point that she couldn't even watch someone else  _play_ with Teddy, then he would come in for his share of scrutiny in the end. Andromeda couldn't take care of Teddy herself, but she resented sharing the role with someone else equally. That couldn't continue.  
  
 _For her sake?_ Draco asked, simple and direct as a knife throw.  
  
 _For all of ours._  
  
Draco nodded, and began.  
  
"I resent the way you think of me because I was stupid during the war, and it reminds me of that stupidity," he told Andromeda. "The way you look at me, and the way the were--Bill Weasley looks at me, it doesn't seem as though I should bother making up for what I did, because no apology would be enough. And what do I have to give other than an apology? All my money is gone, and money doesn't mean much on Hurricane, anyway. I've worked and defended the camp and showed that I loved Teddy, and it isn't enough. What would be?"  
  
Harry wanted to reach out to Draco, hearing the bitter ring in his words, but he sat far enough away, deliberately, that he couldn't touch him. He settled for a gentle caress along the bond instead, like a breeze blowing the silver flowers, and felt Draco nod back to him, although in the physical world he never removed his eyes from Andromeda.   
  
"You haven't apologized yet," Andromeda said, in a voice no bigger than a mouse.  
  
 _A fair point,_ Harry thought, or Draco thought, or they both thought at the same time. When they were this close and their minds were working in tandem, Harry had to admit that he found it hard to tell the way those minds worked apart.   
  
Draco gave a small shrug and said, "I can. I won't do it now, because then you might think it's not sincere, but I will." He leaned forwards as if that would help him with peering into her eyes and learning what she wanted. "Do you think the apology will be enough for Weasley?"  
  
"I could not possibly guess," Andromeda said. She still had dignity left when she drew herself up like that, Harry saw. "I know that you must mean it sincerely, and we must have assurances that you wouldn't do something like that again."  
  
Draco snorted and shook his head, tossing another bubble to Teddy, this one a yellow a few shades brighter than his hair. "What do I have to betray here? There's no Dark Lord anymore, and my parents are lost to me. Someone can't hold them hostage to force me to do as they say."  
  
Harry didn't know if Draco would miss the slight glance that Andromeda gave at Teddy and Harry, but even if he had, then he would feel the thought resonating in Harry's mind and know about it. He tipped his head and snorted. "You would fight to protect Teddy yourself,  _Aunt_ Andromeda. And Harry has the most powerful magic of anyone in the camp. I'm not worried about his ability to break free of someone taking him hostage."  
  
"You would not fight for  _me_ ," Andromeda said, and lowered her eyelids as though to keep him from seeing tears.  
  
Harry thought Draco would break out laughing, but he only said, "You're not someone I care about, until you start caring about me. But I would fight for you because you matter to Harry. That's the reason that I would fight for most of the people here, Granger and the Weasleys included."  
  
"But not simply because they're good people, and human lives matter," Andromeda said, as if it were the clinching argument in a philosophical debate, stabbing her finger at Draco. Harry flinched a little. It was the first time that Andromeda had reminded him of someone he hated, in this case Aunt Petunia.  
  
Draco's thoughts turned sideways and swam through Harry's mind, telling him they would be talking about that memory later, but for right now, he only cocked his head and lifted his eyebrows. "Would you believe me if I made that statement? I'm the evil one, and you expect me to live by perverted principles. What would happen if I  _did_ say that I valued your lives? You would distrust me and claim that I was only saying that to get in good with you, or Harry, or some such thing. It's simpler to be honest."  
  
 _Simpler, but not always more diplomatic,_ Harry told him.  
  
 _You heard her._  
  
Harry had to admit that he had. Andromeda's black-and-white morality was getting in the way of her understanding things, it seemed. She wanted Draco to be all evil, but also to hold the morals of someone she considered all good. And she seemed to realize that she had been unintentionally ridiculous, because she sat there with the struggle silent but visible on her face before saying, "You--is that all you have to say?"  
  
"It is, for right now," Draco said, and folded his hands as though he was sitting at a desk. "If you want me to apologize, I will--later, when you're more likely to take it seriously. But for right now, I want to know what made it impossible for you to take care of Teddy. What will happen to you if you go back to the wizarding world?"  
  
Andromeda closed her eyes and seemed to shrink. Draco's mind stirred impatiently within Harry's, but Harry petted his thoughts.  _When she gets like this, she will tell the truth. She needs some time to get up her courage first.  
  
Courage? Of course. She's a moral coward._  
  
Harry would have asked him to explain that, but at that moment, Andromeda opened her eyes and began to speak, and Harry got too interested in listening to her and watching Draco's reaction to her to ask.  
  
*  
  
Draco scooped Teddy up in his arms and held him close. He was getting tired of chasing the bubbles around, and his head was drooping as twilight began to come in. Harry held out his arms, but Draco shook his head and kept Teddy where he was for right now. He knew his bedtime as well as Harry did, and could enforce it if necessary. No need to move him until it was time.  
  
"I lost my daughter to the war," Andromeda whispered. "And my husband. The husband I defied my family for, the source of my whole  _life._ I would have had such a different life if I'd stayed a Black. I'd have valued different things, thought about different things, and considered myself a pure-blood. Yes, I would," she added, and Draco reckoned that she was paying more attention to his facial expressions than he'd thought. "I would have persuaded myself to think that way because I would have had to have  _something_ valuable for giving up Ted."  
  
Draco hadn't made the connection until this moment that Teddy was named after her Mudblood husband. His arms tightened around Teddy anyway.  
  
"My son-in-law..." Andromeda closed her eyes and swallowed. "He made my life richer for those few months I knew him. I can acknowledge that now. And Dora would have fought in the war anyway, since she was an Auror, and might still have died. I blamed Remus for a while, but that wasn't fair. I  _do_ love Teddy. I wouldn't give him up for anything.  
  
"But I lost my daughter, my husband, my son-in-law. There were five people I was one of, and then there were only two, counting me. You expect me to stand  _up_  under that? I would have if I was the only one Teddy had. I  _could_ have. But Harry was there, and it was...simpler to resign caring for Teddy and interacting with those awful reporters and all the people who wanted me to do stories about Dora and Remus and Ted to him."  
  
Harry was sitting very still, his eyes wider than Draco had known they could go. Draco nodded to him.  _You didn't expect her to say that, did you? You thought she was helpless.  
  
I should have known, maybe, from the way that she could take care of Teddy if I asked her to and she had no other option, _Harry said slowly. The words that limped into Draco's mind were slow and grey, like wounded deer.  _But I thought that only meant she had to be backed into a corner before she could make a decision or take any action. And she might not even mean--if things were totally different, she could have been different. It doesn't mean she can be now._  
  
Draco turned a shoulder towards Harry in silence, and spoke to Andromeda. "You could have made the change, and now you'll need to. Harry has a life of his own now, more than he did when you were in the wizarding world, and Teddy needs his grandmother, too." He wrapped his arms more protectively around his little cousin, who was lightly snoring. "If you forbid me from seeing him, that cuts off another adult that he could rely on, so you'll have to take a bigger part."  
  
Andromeda shook her head. "I said that I could have, not that I would now."  
  
"And if you go back to the wizarding world on your own, with Teddy?" Draco tilted his head at his sleeping cousin again. "You were threatening to make that decision. You would have to take care of him by yourself. Could you do it?"  
  
Andromeda opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She looked so utterly lost Draco might have taken pity on her, but he didn't have much when he looked at Harry. He was watching Andromeda in quiet, coiled closeness, his thoughts gone flat again the way they had when he tortured Rasatis.   
  
 _She only used it as a threat,_ Draco told Harry.  _She never meant it, because she never thought you would choose me over them.  
  
Over her, rather, _Harry said, and Draco wasn't in the mood to contradict him. "Well," Harry said aloud. "If you can help me more, Andromeda, then that would be best. I know you've taken care of Teddy more while I'm away, but I think he needs you to do more than that. The _camp_ needs you to do more than that. You know more about certain kinds of charms than anyone else, you told me, especially Preservation Charms. Or has Hermione already approached you about working with her?"  
  
Andromeda did some more staring. Then she said, "What will you give me if I do this?"  
  
"Of course," Harry said, before Draco could explode. "A three-way exchange. Draco gives you an apology. You help out more with the camp. And I tell you, honestly, about some things I was avoiding, and try to help you both."  
  
He turned and looked Draco in the eye, and his expression made Draco's heart beat faster. Harry smiled at him, but sadly, and no teasing words came down the link of their bond.  
  
*  
  
Harry rubbed the back of his neck. It was easier than he would have expected because he had come up with these words to speak to Teddy months ago. Someday, Teddy would grow up and want to know about Harry's past, and Harry owed it to him to speak the truth.  
  
"I grew up in an abusive family," Harry said, looking between Draco and Andromeda instead of at either of them. "My cousin kept me from having friends at school. My aunt and uncle told me I was a freak, and I had no other relatives. It got so that I only cared about people who were nice to me, which is why I bonded so fast to Ron and Hermione. The rest of Hogwarts would randomly turn on me, too, so it didn't exactly encourage me to trust other people."  
  
He wanted to stop talking. He wanted to go away. But that was only an irrational conviction. He pushed through it, and kept going.  
  
"So now I only care about the people who've been nice to me, people who want me for who I am and not what I could be to them. I did try, after the war, to be different than that for a while. So many people needed help, and if I could give it, then I thought I owed it to them.  
  
"But no matter what I did, the Ministry suspected me, the  _Prophet_ printed stories about how I was violent or might be the next Dark Lord, and people kept asking for more help instead of accepting that I'd given all I could." For a moment, he looked at Andromeda, because he couldn't not, but he looked away before he cut her heart out. "I got badly bruised when a few people who had been at Hogwarts and watched me duel  _him_  turned on me, and said that they didn't really trust me, because I should have come back and ended the war earlier, to keep students from being tortured during the school year.  
  
"I've decided I don't  _care_ anymore. I gave myself permission to only care about Teddy and my friends and my family. That's it. That's all. I can hurt other people if they come after me, or them. I can do what I want, use my magic for what I want." He tilted his head at Draco and smiled, a little wryly. "That was why I put up so much resistance when the wild magic started to push you into my life. I didn't want someone else to care for. My circle was as big as I liked it, and it could stop there for all I had to say about it."  
  
Draco just looked at him, with something faint and misty in the back of his mind, and the link turning blue-green. Harry pushed through instead of listening. He had to finish this.  
  
"But now that you're here, I have to care for you. I have to be with you. And someone who tries to force me to choose, I'll just abandon." He nodded to Andromeda. "That was why I would let you go back to the wizarding world if you insisted on forcing it."  
  
Andromeda closed her eyes and said nothing. Harry was glad of the lack of a bond with her. If she helped him more in the future, that would be all he could ask for.  
  
He turned and held out his arms. This time, Draco gave him Teddy without hesitating.  
  
But he kept his hand on Harry's arm for a moment, and held his eyes, so Harry could be in no doubt about what he was feeling.  
  
Approval.  
  
Harry smiled wanly back at him. He wasn't sure that was the appropriate response to someone admitting he was broken, and probably beyond repair, but it was what he felt capable of sustaining now. He picked up Teddy and carried him towards Andromeda's house, with Draco and Andromeda both following him.  
  
And they walked side-by-side without sniping, Harry noticed. That was a beginning.  
  
Admitting what he had was a beginning, too. And eventually, he thought, the wound would feel purged, instead of torn open and bleeding.


	13. Comes A-Calling

“We have to talk.”  
  
Harry looked up and blinked. He had explained to Andromeda that he and Draco would probably be building their own house, and she had nodded and turned her back on him, bustling about to prepare tea. At least she had offered the tea to Draco as well, a better result than Harry had expected this early in the game, frankly. He had talked to Andromeda and then to Draco as they sat beside Teddy’s sheets waiting for him to go to sleep, while they kept their eyes and their words away from each other, but they didn’t hex each other, and silence was preferable to insults flying.  
  
All in all, it had been a successful evening, and Harry and Draco had come out of Andromeda’s house to be greeted with the news that Ginny’s bird had eaten the bits of snake-shark and seemed likely to thrive. Harry had gone around unable to stop smiling. He’d sat on a small hill to watch the twilight come in, and Draco had joined him without complaint.  
  
So why the serious tone now? Draco’s mind stirred with too many emotions to make out, and he reached out and put a hand on Harry’s shoulder instead of sending words down the bond. Harry took a deep breath and faced him.  
  
“About what?” he asked.  
  
“We have to talk about what you revealed,” Draco said. “I wish I could have heard it by myself, without Aunt Andromeda there.”  
  
Harry shrugged, letting his arms fall open. If that was all this was about, then he had a simple answer. “I wish that could have happened, too,” he answered. “But it’s not the  _way_ it happened, sorry. I don’t think Andromeda would have trusted us as much if we’d shooed her away when I started speaking.”  
  
“I didn’t mean,” Draco said, and stopped. A clear flash came from his mind, like sunlight reflecting from a mirror, that Harry was learning how to read. Frustration. But Draco continued a moment later, with more strength than Harry would have suspected from him. “I didn’t mean that we needed to talk about how she’d overheard it. I  _know_ you can’t do much about that. What I mean is that we need to talk about what you suffered.”  
  
Harry swallowed and pushed himself away, standing up to stride back and forth with his arms swinging by his sides, although he didn’t leave the top of the hill. He remembered an old, odd fact Hermione had told him, that walking was always good for you and you shouldn’t sit too often. He was getting exercise. “But I talked about it,” he said over his shoulder to Draco. “I lived through it, and it’s done.”  
  
“You’re not that stupid,” Draco said. “Stop pretending that you think I am.”  
  
Harry turned around with his arms pinned across his chest, feeling as though he was pressing up against the edge of a cliff with only the wind to defend him. “Fine,” he said. “But I honestly don’t know what you think you can do. Make me stop being broken? Go back through the gate to Earth and punish the Dursleys? There’s nothing  _left._ I told you what happened to me, and we have to live with that, just the way that Andromeda has to live with her grief.”  
  
“Come  _here_ ,” Draco said, and snared his ankle as Harry strode past him again. Harry tumbled to the grass, and Draco heaved himself on top of Harry, lying chest-to-chest, staring at him so closely that Harry had to struggle to focus on his face past the blur of his nose. “You’re not broken,” Draco said, into his face.  
  
“Someone who doesn’t trust anybody new and doesn’t want anybody new to care for is,” Harry said, and he was glad that he had the fight and the fire back, that he was fighting Draco the way he had when the bond first started, instead of lying still and paralyzed by pain. “I might not even be able to love a child we had. That’s pretty fucking broken, don’t you agree?”  
  
“You would manage to persuade yourself to care for any child of mine, of yours, the same way I showed I can care for Teddy,” Draco said, and dismissed the notion with an airy wave of his hand that irritated Harry more than anything had done so far. He tried to buck and remove Draco from his hips that way, but Draco settled comfortably into place, and Harry’s body reacted in the predictable way. Draco paused, then chuckled. “You want to?” His emotions were bright and clear again, butter-yellow of sunshine mingled with a pale light that he usually showed more when he was angry.  
  
“I don’t know,” Harry said, and shot a hand into Draco’s hair, tugging hard, to see what he would do.  
  
What he did was reach down and clench his hand around Harry’s in warning, squeezing it for a minute so that Harry would know what he felt, and then bend his head and kiss hard enough to split Harry’s lip. Harry closed his eyes and went with it, his head falling back, letting Draco’s hands on his hips and sides squeeze and tease him away from what they’d been talking about.  
  
Except that it turned out Draco intended to carry the conversation into their fucking—and he didn’t even have to talk aloud to do it.   
  
 _You’re not broken,_ he murmured and purred down the bond as he conjured a shield over them that would keep most people from coming too close and curious eyes from seeing in.  _Or do you think I’m broken because I admitted to being a coward?  
  
That’s different, you—  
  
You always feel that it’s different. _Draco was dragging his clothes off, with the maximum of contact, so that Harry felt the scrape of nails and the touch of skin along with the pull of fabric. Then he did the same with his own clothes, giving Harry all the sensations through the bond so it really was impossible to hide from them.  _Because it’s not you, and you think you know best, and you’re just so unique that no one else can_ stand  _it._ He was naked, he had both of them naked, before Harry could concentrate, and he leaned down and let his teeth rest against Harry’s chin without actually biting, just so that Harry had a hard time forgetting they were there. Then he reached into the pocket of his discarded trousers for the lube.  _You’re not different. That’s the real arrogance in what you feel, the sin that you need to be forgiven for but don’t think about. You separate yourself from everyone else. You think that no one else can feel what you feel, that other people can’t face the scars and decide that they might be broken, too. Poor you._  
  
 _I never denied anyone else the right to feel that way,_ Harry argued, as he spread his legs.  _You can call yourself broken. I don’t care._  
  
Draco laughed at him as his fingers slid inside, and Harry closed his eyes in a way that he knew would intensify the feelings instead of allow him to flee from them. But maybe he didn’t want to flee, not right now.  _Except you would argue that I wasn’t, really, and how dare I call myself that? And then you would list all the things I had to be proud of._ He let his teeth rest on Harry’s shoulder this time as he slid inside.  _I think I might as well grace you with a touch of your own medicine._  
  
Harry, twisting urgently on the grass, and feeling strands of it tease and prickle his skin, and feeling Draco twist inside him in response, had no idea what he meant at first. But then Draco began to whisper, in a way that meant he would never get out of breath or have to slow down, even as he rocked into Harry and gasped in unison with him.  
  
 _You’re more intelligent than you give yourself credit for. Most people wouldn’t have managed to stay alive long enough to defeat the Dark Lord, especially not when they’d been raised totally outside our world. Our_ old  _world._ Draco paused, fingers flexing into Harry’s arms, and Harry opened his eyes to look at him. Then he had to turn his head away.  
  
Draco laughed, but didn’t try to make him look, because he could still be inside Harry’s head, mind to mind, whispering, a weight against him, warmth and light there, and there was nothing Harry could do to shut him out.  _And raised by abusive Muggles. You claim that you’re broken because you can’t trust the people who turned on you? I call it a miracle that you trust anyone at all._  
  
Harry flailed and raised his legs, locking them around Draco’s waist, hoping to distract him from his little list. Of course, the way they were linked meant Draco knew the reason he was doing that, and laughed again, thrusting forwards until Harry was driven into the grass and his back hurt.  
  
 _You’re determined. You can pull off the leadership role when it’s not what you wanted. You’ll make bad bargains, like the one you made today with me and Andromeda, because you know it’s necessary. You put others before yourself. You love consistently and deeply, and even if something has to force you to admit new people into your circle, you’re fiercely loyal to them once you have them there._  
  
Harry shuddered and groaned. He didn’t like hearing himself complimented. He never had. He had turned away in embarrassment from the articles about him that came out in the newspapers, even the ones that were pure praise with no blame mingled in them.  
  
But Draco’s compliments were raising his cock, and his body warmed and his voice keened out of his throat as he listened to them.  
  
 _You’re aroused,_ Draco said, marking every word with another pump of his hips, jagged and rhythmless, that hurt Harry and made him want more.  _You like people to love you. You_ want  _it.  
  
_ Harry groaned a protest, this time, but Draco overrode him with a laugh and a swipe to his erection that almost made Harry come right there.  _Your body doesn’t lie. You can’t do anything but go along with me and listen to the way that I talk because you fucking love it. You would like to fuck yourself if you could, wouldn’t you? Do it looking in a mirror._ Draco slowed, rocking in place, staring into Harry’s eyes all the while.  _You can’t. I’m in you, and I don’t plan to move aside for anybody._  
  
It could have been anything, from the color of the emotions that were boiling in Harry’s mind right now to the fact that Draco was in him and  _wanted_ to be there, but something threw Harry over the edge. He shuddered and clung to Draco, needing the support as the air around him changed colors and the pleasure tore him apart.  
  
Draco followed right after, and draped himself over Harry with a soft laugh. “You fucking loved that,” he repeated aloud. “You love the way I ride you. And you love compliments.” He slapped Harry’s shoulder. “That makes you unbroken in my book. Nothing will  _do_ for you but to be loved and respected and wanted like a normal person. That’s what I need, too.”  
  
Harry curled himself around Draco. He didn’t think he was up to speaking aloud, so he simply swept everything he felt now down the bond, and had the satisfaction of seeing Draco’s eyes spark bright before he closed them.  
  
“I know, Harry,” Draco whispered drowsily. “I know.”  
  
*  
  
Draco woke in the morning thinking about how bloody graceful it was to be alive.  
  
He could  _live_ here, he thought, as he lay looking drowsily at the too-blue sky of Hurricane, the way it darkened around the edges, the way that the colors slid and blended into one another. Less rose here, but more shades of blue.  
  
He could  _live_ in a place where people appreciated him, and there was someone who would fight for him. Maybe Harry hadn’t defended him from Andromeda as often as Draco thought he should, but he had done it, finally. And there was Teddy, and the bond with the wild magic, and the power that shredded through him whenever he felt the wind blow. There were the mummidade and their ritual by the ocean. There was the knowledge that Harry was darker in some ways than  _he_ was, that he would do things Draco would never do. Obscurely comforting, that one. He had tortured, indeed, but he hadn’t taken the intense joy in it that Harry seemed to.  
  
He rolled back over and looked at Harry, who was still asleep, smiling as he did so.  
  
He could make the Chosen One believe  _him_ , and accept  _him_ into his body. That was still a source of wonder to Draco.  
  
He reached out a finger to trace the corner of Harry’s mouth, and then became aware of someone watching him. He rolled back over, not lazy now. There were claws on his fingers and steel in his spine.  
  
Two of the mummidade trotted towards him, their horns interlocked in a way that made them seem to skim over the grass like birds with joined wings. They were a different pair than the ones Draco had met before with Harry, Hornlock or Grassgifted or any of the others. But there were two of them, and that meant they could speak.  
  
They halted in front of Draco and stared at him intently again, and Draco sighed as he remembered and reached out to shake Harry. They could only speak to people bonded by the wild magic, which meant he and Harry had to be awake and sharing their minds to hear them.  
  
Harry came awake more slowly than usual, and the first thing he looked at, instead of the two mummid or the winds, was Draco. Draco let his hand rest on Harry’s face, regretted that they could not enjoy the moment for long, and pushed more emotions down the bond, in colors of peach and cream and gold, before turning to face the mummid.  
  
 _What do you want of us?_ he asked, with Harry’s words chiming along with his, and the way the mummid went still said they had heard.  
  
The mummid sent back one flickering image, of sunlight in water, so quick and so quickly obscured that Draco was almost sure he had not seen it. But Harry grunted and said down the bond,  _Sunglint,_ so Draco reckoned that he could give them credit for a name, at least.  
  
Then the mummid’s images began moving faster and faster, and if Draco hadn’t practiced so much at silent communication with Harry over the last few days, he doubted he would have caught them all. Blood-stained white fur. The leaping, driving force of the wind, carrying mummid off-course and into birds’ claws. Birds swarming above them, wings flapping so hard that the grasses bent under them and the mummid were prevented from leaping simply by that, and the sound of the birds’ shrieks came sharp and hungry enough to make Draco cringe.  
  
“They’ve come,” Harry whispered, not understanding as quickly as Draco did but putting words around the thought more quickly, as usual. “The birds. They’ve broken their usual migration and come back out of season.” He rolled over and stared at Draco. “Do you think that someone stirred them up? Or was killing the bird the way we did, and taking one to tame, something that upset the natural balance?”  
  
“I would prefer not to blame ourselves until we have all the available evidence,” Draco said coolly, and turned to face Sunglint again. “So. You want us to come and fulfill the promise of our alliance by helping you?”  
  
Once again, images pelted and poured past him, but now one of them was Harry and Draco explaining the presence of a bird in the camp to the mummid who had come to question them. Draco nodded. Sunglint trusted them to have solved one problem in the past. They trusted them to solve this one now.  
  
“Come on,” he said, standing up and holding out a hand to Harry. “We have a job to do.”  
  
*  
  
Harry tilted his head back and closed his eyes. It was easier to imagine the course the birds had flown in his mind that way, and he could feel Sunglint shifting alongside them, pouring new images in whenever he or Draco paused.  
  
Yes, the birds had flown there, from above that small hill in the distance and over the curves of golden grass that stretched before and behind them. They had gathered in a flock suddenly, as though called together by some larger force. Harry shuddered a little. He didn’t want to imagine a force powerful enough to compel the birds of Hurricane.  
  
 _Then don’t imagine it._  
  
Harry flashed back annoyance at Draco, and kept his eyes firmly closed. They were going to  _do_  this, and imagining the course the birds had flown was the first step. Then they might know where they had come from, and where they had gone.  
  
Draco was with him as he worked, stirring up the winds and setting them to observation. Draco was the one who handled Sunglint’s anxiety and sent back a reassuring wave of protectiveness, the idea that they were  _doing_ something. Harry didn’t know for sure if he could make the winds tell him about something that had occurred in the past instead of happening right now. It wasn’t like the winds were sentient, or that they had a sense of time.  
  
But he was trying, and while he tried, Draco would be right there next to him, making sure he had a fighting chance.  
  
Perhaps it was because he wasn’t thinking obsessively about it, but the winds whispered up and over and through him, and then came down in his mind with a sharp image. Harry opened his eyes, gasping. The image was seen from above, and to the side, and it took a moment for him to make sense of it and reduce it to human perspectives.  
  
“You saw it?” Draco’s voice was soft and tense. Working with Sunglint, alone, must be taking up more effort than Harry realized when he didn’t have to be a conscious part of the bond.  
  
“Yes,” Harry said, and turned his head. He realized that he was looking over the plains in a more northerly direction, neither the eastern path they had taken towards the sea nor the western one they had followed when Primrose’s people were killed and they went to avenge their deaths. “They came from that way. And something—something was  _driving_ them. Not bringing them, not tempting them. Driving them.” He shivered.  
  
For a moment, Draco stood very still, while Sunglint flashed their name-image over and over again. Harry thought it served the same purpose as soothing muttering would for a human. Then Draco inclined his head and said, “You’re sure?”  
  
Harry nodded. He could still feel the force the winds had felt, the dark rising thing that was like a storm but more sentient. The winds had whirled and fled before it. Harry doubted that it could  _hurt_ the winds, which after all had no more stable identity than the mummid did and which he and Draco cut all the time, but it had still changed the sky.  
  
“Made it go still,” he said aloud. “That’s what it did.”  
  
Draco tensed beside him. Harry knew he was thinking of the ritual they had witnessed and how all the winds in the area by the ocean had spiraled into the middle of that dance.   
  
“Was it something like that, then?” Draco asked, when the breathless moment had passed by. “Another creation ritual? Because the mummidade can use it is no reason to think that other species can’t, too.”  
  
“We know the birds reproduce by eggs,” Harry said, shaking his head. “I don’t think it had anything to do with them. The birds were—tools. The same way the wild magic is a tool to me and you.”  
  
Draco nodded. “Then we have another enemy,” he said, and Harry realized that his cheeks were flushed and his eyes alight. “Something else that we can fight and destroy with no worries about whether it will provide meat for the camp, or whether it’s human and it’s immoral to torture it.”  
  
Harry stared at him. “ _You_ were the one who pointed out that it was immoral of me to torture Rasatis,” he said at last.  
  
“Yes, but I would prefer not to have to deal with the complication,” Draco said smoothly, looking at the northern horizon as if it was Harry after a good fuck. “This way, we can be sure that we won’t have to. It can’t be anyone human who’s controlling the birds.”  
  
Harry sighed, but he had to agree. Even assuming that another human had bonded to Hurricane’s wild magic more strongly than he had, or that one of the Unspeakables had remained behind when they explored the world and so knew more about it than anyone else, the winds’ memory of it didn’t  _feel_ human. The winds knew and understood wizards now, thanks to the existence of Draco and Harry, just as they understood the existence of the mummidade. Harry thought he could probably identify the birds and the snake-sharks and any humans who lived in other communities and used the wild magic, too. But this was different.  
  
 _Bodiless,_ said Sunglint suddenly, or seemed to say, picturing the wind ruffling white fur and the way that the wind danced away again, and how horns would strike it and come to rest on nothing.  
  
“Bodiless,” Draco echoed blankly. “Is that their name for a particular enemy?”  
  
“According to our alliance, their enemies are our enemies,” Harry said. He stretched, and tried to work out the kinks in his arms that seemed to have taken up residence there from a night of sleeping on the ground—and other activities on the ground. He tried to ignore Draco’s smirk. “We should tell the others.”  
  
“And go away on our own again?” Draco asked softly, catching his wrist as Harry started to turn back towards the camp. “The others won’t like it, not so soon after we spent so much time by the sea on our own.”  
  
Harry hesitated. That was true. And it might also be true that they should investigate discreetly, not go charging off to the north and warn whatever waited there.  
  
 _You’re learning to be sensible,_ Draco murmured.  _I’m impressed._  
  
Harry ignored him and focused on Sunglint again. He tried to come up with images of the mummid standing at their side as they walked north, and hoped that he had managed when he oriented on the same small hill and sweeps of grassy plains they had shown him.  
  
The mummid passed some time in staring at him. Then they dipped their horns and trotted further into the camp.  
  
 _And sometimes, a sensible genius,_ Draco said.  
  
Harry smiled at him, and they went to their council of war.


	14. A Force in the North

“I don’t think it’s a good idea. Not after you went away so soon the last time.”  
  
Draco leaned back on his elbows in the grass and watched Granger speak. She had started out sitting in the loose semi-circle that the rest of them had formed around the central figure of Harry, but she had leaped up to her feet soon enough and hadn’t sat down since. Now she paced back and forth just outside the limit of the circle, ignoring the way that Weasley tried to reach up a hand and tickle her leg. She seemed used to doing that, Draco thought. As though he annoyed her that way often.  
  
Well, in this case it was most likely an attempt to get her to settle down and  _listen_ to some of the things people were saying. But Draco could imagine how irritating it would be to feel Weasley’s nails on his bare leg, and couldn’t help but twitch with a little sympathy for Granger.  
  
“Why not?” Weasley asked, when Granger didn’t look at him and no one else had said anything for several minutes. Draco could feel the effort it took Harry to hold himself back, and made sure to hold his eyes for a second and nod. Harry basked in the praise, and meanwhile Weasley went on, quite oblivious of the important things that were happening in bonds around him. “Harry and Malfoy are the ones best-suited for it, because of their magic. Who else could we send?”  
  
Granger turned and frowned down at Weasley as if she wondered where he got off disobeying her. Weasley only met her eyes with a very long and slow and wise look that Draco hadn’t thought him actually capable of. Granger looked back, and then suddenly moved back to her place in the circle and sat down.  
  
“I just think that they’ve been away too often, and they need to share in the work of the camp,” she said. “No one else will learn to trust them otherwise, and Malfoy is already distrusted enough.”  
  
Draco blinked. He had been thinking much the same thing lay behind the objections to their going away, but he hadn’t expected such bluntness from Granger, who ran around trying to smooth down the problems between everyone the same way that she smoothed the dirt in the greenhouses.  
  
“What about me?” Harry asked, in an almost passionless tone that couldn’t disguise the quivering, dancing flames in the bond from Draco. Harry was tightening for a fight, and for resistance, and for learning that they really  _did_ feel that way about him, the way he had always assumed they did. Draco caught his eye and shook his head this time, and Harry blinked and shut his mouth.   
  
“We don’t trust you as much as we should,” the Dragon-Keeper said, bending forwards. “Because you’ve spent so much time with Malfoy, Harry, and because of the way that you  _have_ changed since we got here. I don’t think you mean to, but you give the rest of us a creepy feeling, sometimes. Like now,” he added, and his gaze darted back and forth between Harry and Draco. “The way you’re looking at him.”  
  
“You know we have a bond,” Harry said, his voice a bit strained. “You know we can read each other’s thoughts. It would be a bit stupid to pretend we couldn’t, and it would probably only make you distrust us more.”  
  
The Dragon-Keeper nodded, and then stood up. It seemed that people were only going to listen to them if they stood up, Draco decided, and rose to his own feet. The Dragon-Keeper rocked back on his heels a little, obviously not expecting to be faced, but pushed ahead with what he obviously intended to say. “Look, Malfoy, we agreed that we would forgive what you’d done in exchange for Ginny’s life. But what about what you intend to do in the future?  _Can_ you promise that you’ll put the good of the camp, and the rest of us, ahead of your own good?”  
  
Draco leaned further back, and felt the pulse of worry from Harry’s direction. He waved a lazy mental arm at Harry in return.  _Don’t worry. I know how to handle this._ And he did, although it might not be in a way that the Weasleys wanted, or had really bargained on when they started questioning him.   
  
“What about what you might do in the future?” he asked quietly.  
  
The Dragon-Keeper frowned at him. “What? I haven’t done anything so far to make you feel less than welcome.”  
  
“You keep questioning me,” Draco said. “You keep questioning Harry.” He ignored a mutter from the side that it was unnatural to hear him calling Harry by his first name. He suspected it hadn’t come from Harry’s original friends or Andromeda, and that was all that mattered at the moment. “You might start distrusting us more and more, and try to stab us in our sleep some night. Or at least require that Harry abandon me. Or tell me that because of what I’ve done in the past, you’ll  _never_ trust me. Your brother attacked me. Does that mean I should never trust him again? To fight by my side and guard my back, if nothing else?”  
  
“We don’t have anything like your reputation,” the Dragon-Keeper began.  
  
Draco rolled his eyes. “But you’re trying to argue based on the future now, not the past.”  
  
“The future  _influences_ the past.”  
  
“Then our families’ blood-feud has to influence it, too,” Draco said. “And let’s not forget that our ancestors have done some fairly nasty things to each other in the past. Shall I think that you’re untrustworthy because of what your Great-Uncle Samuel did to my Great-Aunt Natasha?”  
  
There was some more frowning, but the Dragon-Keeper slowly sank down again. Granger popped up as though she resented all the minutes that someone else had been talking.  
  
“Talking about the future, if you only think of it in that light, is useless,” she said impatiently. “We might as well give up right now and let the birds have us. And I’m sick of these old arguments that go nowhere. The question  _is,_ should we let Harry and Malfoy go away and investigate this thing to the north when they just got back from a journey that almost killed them?”  
  
Harry shivered. Draco narrowed his eyes at him, and Harry shrugged back, with an expression on his face that Draco understood without the words that accompanied it down the bond.  _When she gets going on something like this, then she never shuts up._  
  
Draco grimaced back, but leaned down into the grass to listen to Granger. At least she had picked up the conversation and hauled it bodily in another direction, instead of letting it circle on the old path that, he had to admit, was getting boring even to him.  
  
*  
  
Harry was glad Draco had lost some of his combative stance. He could imagine Hermione and Draco clashing over what they should argue about next, and it was—frightening.  
  
Now Hermione had Andromeda’s attention, surprisingly. Andromeda put a hand on Teddy’s back, although he had spent the entire meeting asleep in her arms, and asked, “What happens if they get killed on these missions, without support? Then we’ve lost our strongest defenses.”  
  
She didn’t look at Draco, but the fact that she had said it was amazing enough. Harry could feel the emotions flowing from Draco, and they didn’t feel like the same ones he had spoken before. They were bright white and orange with wonder and surprise. Draco caught his eye and sneered a little, and the emotions changed color.  
  
 _I think it’s a good thing that you let her compliment you, without objecting,_ Harry sent to him.  
  
Draco said nothing in return, but the emotions shifted a bit back towards the lighter side of the spectrum. Harry smiled his satisfaction at the change and listened to Hermione’s answer, as she turned to face Andromeda.  
  
“Who could go with them?” Hermione asked simply. “If we strip the camp of most of its defenses, then there’s no one left here to tend the greenhouses or protect our homes if a bird attacks  _us_. Or something else,” she added, in tones that told Harry she hadn’t forgotten the snake-shark. “That’s the core of our problem. We send out a small expeditionary force and rely on them, to the exclusion of everything, or we make ourselves vulnerable by sending out a bunch of people who can’t move as fast.”  
  
“If Harry could carry Malfoy on the winds, then he could carry us,” Percy pointed out.  
  
“I don’t know how many people I could carry,” Harry said, to contribute a simple fact to the debate. He didn’t know if they would listen to him, and in truth, he wasn’t sure that they ought to, either. He wanted to go alone and investigate with Draco if they did go. He didn’t want to be responsible for a whole crowd of people trailing behind him, and the arguments they would probably have every day.  
  
“It was a suggestion,” Percy said, in a mild tone. “I would like to see more of Hurricane.”  
  
“If we go,” Harry said, “we go into danger. The mummidade are sure that whatever lies to the north made the birds attack out of season.” He tilted his head at the two mummid of Sunglint, who stood still on the outer edge of the circle and watched in silence. Harry thought the debate would be largely incomprehensible to them, since they would see a lot of halves of people sitting around and babbling. “Keep that in mind. It’s not going to be a sightseeing trip to the sea or the plains.”  
  
“I’d like to go, too,” Hermione said, and sighed. “And I hate to see you risk your lives so soon after everything else you’ve done for us. But I think that you’re right and it would make the most sense to send people into danger who’ve proven they know how to handle it.”  
  
That was the clinching suggestion, and not many people argued after that. Harry thought many of them secretly agreed with Hermione, but had been searching for ways to express it without sounding like cowards. They didn’t care so much what happened to Malfoy.  
  
With Harry…  
  
He didn’t feel hated and despised by the Weasleys, not exactly. But he did know that being away from the camp meant he could do some good that he couldn’t do here, not when he was continually suspected and watched by the others.  
  
 _You’re relieved for a holiday from the gingers,_ Draco murmured into the back of his mind.  _You could just say it, you know._  
  
Harry shot back a furious bolt at him, but said nothing in words. That would only lead to another mocking sort of argument, and he was occupied in listening to the reassuring murmurs from people around them, and watching glances between Ron and Hermione that he expected to lead to something in particular.  
  
And they did, when Ron and Hermione came up to him and Draco and asked to go with them.  
  
From the way Draco stared, Harry decided that he hadn’t been anticipating the request, even though he had felt Harry thinking about them. Well, he didn’t pay attention to all of Harry’s thoughts that he should, either, any more than Harry paid attention to all of his.  
  
Harry grinned a little, and awaited the response Draco would make. He already knew what he would say to his best friends, that he would welcome their company, but he had no idea what protest or agreement would occur to Draco.  
  
*  
  
Draco conjured up as clear a picture as he could of sweeping over the great plains of Hurricane, the silver flowers bobbing and tossing in the wind, and the efficient way they had gathered fish and killed the snake-shark, and flung the image at Harry. Then he conjured up an image of what those things would probably be like if they had someone else along with them, especially  _two_ someone elses, and one of them an expert at questioning every decision she hadn’t made herself.  
  
 _We aren’t going to the ocean, so we aren’t going to encounter the same problems,_ was Harry’s gentle protest.  
  
Draco was tempted to turn his back and march away, but that didn’t solve anything. Besides, Sunglint was still there, moving closer, and Draco didn’t know what it would do to the mummid or the camp’s alliance with them if they saw the only bonded pair of humans they knew and trusted fighting with other humans.  
  
 _You don’t play fair,_ Draco thought back to Harry, and said aloud, “I don’t think you would like our method of travel. Granger, I’ve never heard you spoken of as a broom traveler, although I know Weasley was a fair Quidditch player.” He nodded at Weasley to show that he meant it, and then waited, his head cocked.  
  
Weasley grimaced and spoke around what looked like a large, sour, invisible plum shoved into his mouth. “I can take one of the brooms, Malfoy.”  
  
“We really can’t, Ron,” Granger reminded him. “The camp needs then more than we do, when we have someone who can transport us in a different way.” She turned to face Harry. “So would you lift me and see how I do on a trial flight?”  
  
Draco blinked. He had to admit that he admired Granger’s courage. She saw a challenge, she flung herself at it.  
  
 _Even if, in this case, I could have wished for a little less on her part,_ he told Harry.  
  
 _And a little more on yours?  
  
You know it’s not cowardice that doesn’t make me enjoy the company of your friends, _Draco told him, proud that his emotions came out as calm and smooth as a block of ice.  _Acting as though they’re above me and I need to apologize before I breathe is what makes me want some time away from them._  
  
It seemed for a moment as though Harry would respond, and aggressively, but then Draco felt him check the impulse, and bow his head.  _You’re right, and I’m sorry,_ he said, before he turned back to Granger and Weasley. “If you trust me to transport you with the winds, and if you won’t scold Draco, then you can come with us,” he said.  
  
Granger clasped her hands and beamed at Harry, while Weasley clapped him on the shoulder. “Like old times, mate, huh?” he asked, and his beaming smile was of the kind that Draco couldn’t help but resent.  
  
“Not exactly,” Harry said lightly, and touched Weasley’s hand, then took it off his shoulder, which helped Draco’s temper somewhat. “We’re on a different world, and a lot more rides on it this time.”  
  
Weasley snorted a little. “The last time, we didn’t have high stakes?”  
  
Harry’s face took on a pensive expression. “I still think someone else could have killed him, after I was dead,” he murmured. “What was important was that the piece of him in me died, not that I cast the final spell.”  
  
“But you were the only one who could have killed him in the way you did,” Granger pointed out, when Draco thought they would go along with Harry’s tiresome self-blaming spiel for a moment. “That way, there was no bloodshed, and no one had to tear their soul to commit murder on him.  _Including_ you.”  
  
Harry smiled at her, and Draco cocked his head. The emotions that came to him down the link were different than many he had felt when Harry was around his friends before, or at least around the other Weasleys. Harry was radiating white and gold, affection and admiration and trust.  
  
 _You believe her where you don’t believe me because you think she’s smarter than you,_ Draco realized in shock.  
  
 _I never said you weren’t smart,_ Harry snapped back, and visibly rolled his eyes the next time Draco looked at him.  
  
Draco shook his head, and said nothing of the many things he wanted to say, one of which was that he understood some of the suggestions he might make now when he wanted Harry to believe him instead of recoil into his own shell. Harry snorted anyway, and faced Weasley and Granger.  
  
“We’ll need to bring some extra food,” he began.  
  
“I don’t eat  _that_ much,” Weasley said, and he and Harry exchanged smiles that made Draco shift closer to Harry’s side. No matter what happened, he was  _not_ going to be left behind and out of this. He was  _not_.  
  
“Not now that you’ve finally finished your growth spurt,” Harry murmured. “But no, what I was thinking was that we won’t have much time to hunt when we go to the north. We’ll move quickly to get there, so we don’t have to be away from the camp as long, and we’ll move high. We might not be able to see the ground below us at times.”  
  
Granger turned green, but nodded. “Can you—do you think you can make a kind of chair of wind to hold me? That would be the most comfortable for me.”  
  
Harry’s eyes lit up. “Of course, and if I can’t shape the wind just right, then Draco can cut the magical wind I’ll call up, can’t you, Draco?” He turned his head and invited Draco into the conversation just like that.  
  
Draco stared at him. Then he said, “Yes. If you’ll trust me with the safety of your life,” he added to Granger, because while he could feel exactly why Harry thought this was a good idea, that didn’t mean Harry’s friends felt the same way.  
  
Granger’s eyes met his and sparked, but her voice was polite. “I don’t think Harry can do it without you. I would much rather trust the safety of my life to you than just to him if he doesn’t think he can do it.” She shuddered and glanced at Harry, smiling, in a way that made Draco want to know which memory had prompted that smile.  
  
“Besides, we’ve been trusting you with our safety since you first joined the camp and helped us guard,” Weasley added gruffly. “Or since you destroyed that bird, anyway, if you don’t want to go back that far.” He must have seen the instinctive protest in Draco’s eyes.  
  
Draco waited to say anything, because from the way he gnawed a corner of his mouth, Weasley wasn’t finished. A moment later, he jerked his head down and muttered, “And we trust you with Harry’s life. That’s even more important.”  
  
 _They have, you know._  
  
Draco twitched his head in acknowledgment of Harry’s words, but he couldn’t control the frightening chaos of his own emotions enough to respond. He felt as if he was standing on the shore during a storm. What was he supposed to  _say_ to that? To the openness, to the fact that he was being trusted not to let Harry’s friends fall?  
  
 _I never wanted the responsibility. You can tell them that.  
  
You can, too, _Harry pointed out.  _And if you mean the responsibility for my life, seems to_ me  _that you rather insisted on taking it._  
  
And he had. From the moment he had realized what the bond could mean to him, the kinds of wild magic it could lead him into, he had been determined to hang onto Harry instead of letting him get away.  
  
Draco grimaced and said, “If you trust me to cut and lay the wind for you, then I will. That doesn’t mean that I find it— _admirable_ in you to trust me with that much.”  
  
“That untrustworthy, are you?” But Weasley only smiled at him, as if he knew something Draco didn’t, and clapped Harry on the shoulder again. “I think we should leave as soon as possible, after we’ve gathered the food. And keep in mind that it’s been a while since I’ve even been on a broom, let alone anything rougher, will you?”  
  
“What’s the matter, Weasley?” Draco murmured. He could feel Harry glowering at him, but really, he could not  _help_ himself. “Afraid to keep up the old Quidditch skills in case I should challenge you for a match?”  
  
Weasley gave him a sharp smile. “You’re on, if you ever want to play. I’ll insist that you use a broom, of course.”  
  
“I can’t fly on my own,” Draco said smoothly. “A broom would be acceptable, since I assume that neither of us wants Harry interfering in the match.” He leaned his arm on Harry’s shoulder, the opposite shoulder from the one Weasley rested on, but still an understandable claim.  
  
“You’re on,” Weasley said.  
  
“You can leave the dick-measuring contest out of this,” Granger snapped, with a violence that made Draco flinch in surprise before he thought about it. “In the  _meantime_ , you and I should go fetch the food, Harry. The rest of you are welcome to come with us, but I thought you might want to say goodbye to Teddy and your aunt, Draco.” She marched off, and Harry followed her a stunned moment later.  
  
Left by himself to face Weasley, Draco stared at him, shook his head, and said, “Your girlfriend’s got a mouth on her.”  
  
“Sometimes,” Weasley said, and leered at him. “And you won’t want to know what  _else_ she uses that mouth for.”  
  
Draco spat on the ground, the only way he could come up with of expressing what the image Weasley had just planted in his mind did to him. “Why did you tell me  _that_?”  
  
Weasley was silent for a moment, looking down towards the camp as if he wanted to make sure that neither Granger nor Harry would overhear them. Since he wasn’t connected by a bond to Granger, Draco wasn’t sure why he was so worried about her. He could feel the muffled emotions from Harry, amusement and worry among them. He let them ride for now, and stood there without taking his eyes off Weasley.  
  
“Because I’m trying to be human, here,” Weasley said at last. He looked back at Draco, and his face had become harsher and greyer, more austere and more adult. “Because you’re part of Harry’s life, and you’ve proven that you aren’t going anywhere. I’m going to get along with you the same way I do with Andromeda—under protest. But I’ll do it.” He spent a few more minutes watching Draco, who couldn’t find his tongue even given the extra time. “The real question is, are you mature enough to do it back?”  
  
Draco took a deep breath. By  _fuck,_ of course he was. It was just that Weasley refused to understand things like that. Draco held out his hand.  
  
After so many moments of measuring that it rather felt as if years had passed in that time, Weasley shook it.  
  
And Draco wasn’t sure that it was worth it, until he felt the burst of uncomplicated joy coming up the bond from Harry, and was able to smile.


	15. The Flight North

Harry twisted his body and caught Hermione as she almost dropped from the clouds for the fifth time. She was gasping, her hair flying around her, and her cheeks so red from the wind that for a moment Harry thought he knew what she would look like if she ever wore makeup.  
  
“Okay?” he asked her gently, as he set her in the grass, and his winds withdrew from Hermione to gambol around him. They didn’t move slowly, or do anything that showed they knew what had happened. Harry shook his head at himself a moment later. The winds only changed their speed in response to how much magic and will he put into them, or in response to the mysterious magical laws of the planet. There was no reason to think that they would recognize human tragedy, when they had caused quite a bit of it.  
  
“Yes.” Hermione shook her head, swallowed, and then straightened up. “That chair idea sounds like a good one after all,” she said. “I thought I could just stretch out and fly on the wind the way you and Malfoy do.”  
  
She looked so grey that Harry squeezed her shoulder. “Because you can’t do one thing doesn’t mean you can’t do others,” he pointed out gently. “I  _know_ that I could never have handled the politics in the camp the way you do.”  
  
She blinked at him. “But you were the leader.”  
  
“And what did I do when things got uncomfortable?” Harry snorted, and ignored the glee of Draco dancing up and down in the back of the bond. He could have been gleeful about the way Hermione had practically fallen from the winds, or he could be gleeful about what Harry was admitting, but Harry didn’t really want to listen to either one right now. “I went away. ‘Leading,’ sure, I wasn’t idle, but I also didn’t want to deal with some of the demands that the others made on me.”  
  
Hermione looked at him closely, and Harry could see her reevaluating some of his past behavior. Then she nodded. “As long as you don’t mind putting the winds into the chair-shape? Do you think—you can  _convince_ them to stay like that, can’t you?”  
  
Harry laughed and wrapped his hands around each other, visualizing a chair like the ones Hermione had used in her own dining room before they left the wizarding world. “Yes, I can,” he said. “You have to be afraid of me getting distracted by something before I would drop you.” He gestured behind her.  
  
Hermione raised her eyebrows, but arranged her robes around her to try and sit comfortably. “You didn’t have to tell me  _that_.”  
  
“I’d prefer not to have secrets from you, or Ron, either,” Harry said quietly, meeting her eyes. He was uncomfortably aware that he and Draco still hadn’t mentioned Rasatis or anything to do with her, but he was shivering with the intensity of what he wanted to say. At least he would be able to tell them the truth once they were away from camp and all the people who might hear what he was saying and react without giving him the chance to explain. “I want to tell the truth.”  
  
Hermione watched him with a small smile for a minute, and then patted his hand. “I knew you didn’t want to abandon us,” she said. “And Ron was mostly afraid that you would become so caught up in the bond with Malfoy your emotions towards us would change.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “They have changed, but they wouldn’t lessen.” No way he could conceal the first part of that, when even the way he interacted with Ron and Hermione in the wizarding world had changed in the past few years.  
  
Hermione touched his shoulder this time. “Good. Now.” She shifted her bottom a little, and Harry added some firmness to the winds. “How does this bloody chair work?”  
  
*  
  
Draco could  _get along_ with Weasley and Granger. That was not the problem. Especially since Harry was sweeping both Weasley and Granger in specially-constructed chairs of wind, and he and Harry, the experienced flyers, were a good distance ahead. The roaring wind around them would probably prevent Weasley and Granger from eavesdropping even if they wanted to.  
  
But getting rid of the persistent feeling that they slowed him and Harry down, that they clung and dragged on them…that was another matter.  
  
 _Do you still dislike them for the same reasons that you did when we were children?_  
  
Draco turned over on his back. So far this morning, Harry had flown with his face straight ahead, only turning back for quick looks at his friends and smiles at Draco. Draco had wondered when he would challenge the cloud of emotions that he could feel brewing in the back of Draco’s head.  
  
 _Dislike has little to do with it,_ he answered.  _They’re like Teddy, except not small enough to accept me in the thoughtless way Teddy does._  
  
Harry snorted and turned over to match him. Draco was  _almost_ sure Granger’s face turned green as she watched them handling the winds so casually, and he wanted to smirk.  _So you’ll have to work to get along with them, the way you did with Andromeda. Is that so horrible?_  
  
Draco rolled his eyes.  _You’re missing the point, as usual.  
  
Sorry. I know I do that a lot._  
  
Draco scowled at the clouds racing by ahead of them, the only things to stain the elaborate dark blue shell of the sky. He couldn’t have asked for a better partner than Harry in most ways, but would giving him someone with just a little more  _pride_ have been impossible?   
  
 _I mean, they’re more people that I have to share you with, that you pay attention to when you could be paying attention to me.  
  
Is this some special sickness of the sky or something? _Harry demanded, flipping over so that he hovered directly above Draco. Draco eyed the way their bodies matched and wondered what would happen if he moved his hips up and down—specifically, whether Granger and Weasley would probably fall out of their chairs trying to avert their eyes.  _The only time you react this way is when we’re distant from the camp, and then suddenly you’re all possessive. Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to do that when I’m surrounded by lots of other people who have a claim to my attention?  
  
Don’t tell me which of my emotions make sense, _Draco said, but he did have to frown. Yes, what was it that made flying seem more something he wanted to do alone with Harry than something he wanted others to share in?  
  
Harry snorted at him and swirled away and back to his friends. Draco craned his neck, but he couldn’t see around Harry to the expression on their faces right now, and so couldn’t know how they had reacted to the sight of Harry above him. He sighed.  
  
 _Not that it would give them an accurate picture of what we’re like anyway, with you being on top._  
  
Harry’s half of the bond turned red. Draco flipped himself over, so that he could watch the plains wash by beneath them. They’d seen nothing for the two hours of their flight yet but golden grass, and sometimes small, rippling hills. Draco watched for a sight of the mummidade, and the rabbit-like creatures as well, though he really doubted he could see them from this height. They probably turned thin the minute a shadow passed over them, anyway.  
  
Gold, and gold, and blue. That was the description the first Unspeakables to explore the planet had made of Hurricane, and Draco could see why. Unless you had been to the sea or the field of silver flowers, you would think they were the only colors that existed here.  
  
But what else might be out there, strange and exciting, existing just beyond their range of sight?  
  
And he and Harry could go find more of it, faster, if they weren’t bound to the slow pace that Harry’s friends needed.  
  
 _Who knows whether we would make a good job of it?_ Harry murmured, diving past Draco, his outstretched fingers brushing Draco’s. Draco watched as Harry dived and looped beneath them, scanning the grass for any sign that an enemy was catching them up. Draco’s throat ached as he watched him. There was so  _much_ that he wanted to do and share with Harry, and wouldn’t be able to now that they had someone else with them.  _This way, we have more eyes, and someone might see something we don’t._  
  
Draco simply grunted, because he couldn’t disparage Granger’s reasoning skills, and he knew that Weasley had been trained as an Auror before they departed Earth, which meant he might have some observation ability if nothing else.  
  
So they flew on, and the hills of camp were long gone behind them when they first saw the thing that would change the rest of their lives on Hurricane.  
  
*  
  
It was Hermione who saw it first, utterly to Harry’s unsurprise. He had to concentrate on the winds that held his friends up, and the winds that scouted ahead of them, and the fact that birds might come after them at any moment or they might feel a sign of the force to the north, and so he wasn’t paying as much attention to the ground as he otherwise would have.  
  
“ _Look_.”  
  
The wind brought the words to his ear, or Harry wouldn’t have heard it. He turned his face downwards at once, though, and saw what had Hermione almost leaning out of her chair in rapt contemplation.  
  
The plains turned and unscrolled beneath them, and there, there, in the heart of them, on a small hill that barely rose above the rest of the ground, was a shining thing.  
  
Harry saw walls in those first startled moments, walls and squares that reminded him of houses. And then he shook his head, and the shining separated into two distinct groups of shapes. The first one was square and  _did_ look like houses huddled inside a wall, but the next thing was a long, oval shape that looked like water. It was the first lake Harry had seen on Hurricane, but no streams flowed into it. It simply lay there.  
  
Draco cut the winds that held him, dropping towards it. Harry adjusted the position of Ron and Hermione’s chairs, and they went down.  
  
Harry did  _watch_ as they dropped, because this was more than likely inhabited by someone, and the last thing they needed was a trap springing on them. But nothing moved in the houses as they landed, and nothing in the water.  
  
Which wasn’t water, now that Harry could see it more closely. It didn’t ripple, and it didn’t smell of water, and the edge of the oval was perfectly level with the edge of the ground, not dipping into even a slight bank. But he couldn’t tell what it was, only that it was smooth and silver and glinted and flashed in the sun.  
  
Hermione ran towards it. Harry threw up a barrier of wind in her way instinctively, and she turned around to glare at him, a glare that became sheepish a moment later. “Sorry,” she murmured. “I know I shouldn’t have done that. I just—got excited, that’s all.”  
  
Harry nodded his brisk acceptance of her apology, and moved forwards beside her to examine the oval. Ron was spreading out in rearguard, keeping an eye on what wasn’t houses, after all, only squares of raised stone, roofless and open to the elements. Draco had spread out to the left, and Harry could feel the bond thrumming as he stared at the silver thing.  
  
“Well,” Ron said, when they’d all spent minutes standing there and nothing had happened. “Isn’t someone going to touch it?”  
  
“You go right ahead, Weasley,” Draco said. “It would be amusing to watch it eat your hand.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes at him, and Ron actually grinned. Maybe he’d expected something like that, when he decided to speak; Harry didn’t know. At least Hermione nodded and said, “We need it to test it with something. But no flesh.  _Accio_ stone.”  
  
A small stone rose from the nearest wall and whizzed towards her, landing with a plop in her hand. Ignoring Draco’s mutter about how she could have killed someone if her Summoning Charm had been misdirected, Hermione leaned across the silver oval and dropped the stone in the middle of it. Harry watched it fall, looking like a pebble heading towards a pond for all he could tell.  
  
The stone struck the silver thing in the middle and lay there for a moment—long enough, Harry thought, to prove that the surface was solid, whatever it may have looked like and whatever reflections moved in it towards the bottom. The air seemed to ripple and waver and bound above the stone and beneath it for an instant.  
  
Then the stone  _bent_. It became what looked like a curve of grey, bending inwards and growing smaller and smaller as it swirled away into the depths of the oval. Harry knew the oval was solid by now, but the stone sank through it even so, going down and down, smaller and smaller as it traveled, until finally the grey color of it melted into the silver and he didn’t know if he was squinting after a shadow or the real thing.  
  
Harry came back to himself to realize that they had all taken a step away from the oval. Hermione shivered a little and wrapped her arms around herself. “Well,” she said. “I reckon that settles the question of whether it would be a good idea to touch it.”  
  
“Yeah,” Ron said. He turned away, holding a hand over his mouth. Harry wondered if he had seen something during Auror training that resembled that and made him want to be sick.  
  
“Someone must have lived here, once,” Draco said, his voice distant and his face looking much the same when Harry stole a glance at him. “Perhaps they used that thing for waste disposal. Hard to think what else it would be good for.”  
  
“Executing prisoners?” Harry suggested, and immediately wished he hadn’t, because it meant that he had to think of human bodies bending and warping in the same way the stone had, going down into the pool like that. Ron made a retching noise, and Hermione backed further away from the edge of the oval, and Draco’s emotions coming through the bond turned the same color as that depthless silver.  
  
 _Wonderful timing, genius,_ Harry said to himself, and felt Draco’s emphatic agreement drifting down the bond.  
  
“There must be something here,” Hermione said, turning her back on the oval and striding away into the small, square stone walls that lay behind them. “Something that will tell us who they were.”  
  
*  
  
But there wasn’t. Or else, Draco thought, the things the unknown inhabitants had left behind were not signs they could read.  
  
There were small and incredibly realistic pictures etched into the stone of the walls: sunrises that differed from sunrises Draco had seen only in their lack of color, and mummidade that looked as if they might walk out of the rock in a moment, and what Draco thought was a map and struggled to make sense of long after the others had grown bored and moved on to more “rooms” elsewhere in the complex of walls. It was a picture of a large, flat square, surrounded by ovals, with lines linking them. Draco tried to glance back and forth between the silver oval in the ground and match its shape with one of the ones on the map, but there was simply too much variation for him to be sure which one of them it was, or even whether it  _was_ one of them at all.  
  
The houses were all open to the air, with the example of one small, square stone box that they found in the center of the ruin. Harry tried to lift the lid with wind, but it stayed where it was, molded and locked on. Draco knelt to peer through one small crack in the stone that he thought water had made. Inside, he caught a glimpse of the same silver flash as the oval. After that, he was glad to back away and leave it alone.  
  
In the center of one open “house,” full of drifted grass blades and broken seeds, was a spiral set into the earth. Like the pictures in the stone, whoever had made this apparently didn’t feel the medium of their art resisting them. They seemed to have taken exactly what was in their head and put it down in the dirt, with no faltering.  
  
Draco dared let his hand hover above the spiral, made of a thin line that thickened as it turned outwards from the center, for a long time before he let it come down. It touched nothing but soft, ordinary dirt that crumbled gently between his fingers. He broke the dirt up and looked in silence at the spiral, wondering what kind of feet could have trod that. Or perhaps they had walked on their hands.  
  
They came out of the place at last no wiser than they had gone into it. Granger was pale and kept brushing at her hair as if she thought some contamination worse than its own frizziness covered it. “At least we’ll know what those silver ovals are if we see any more of them,” she muttered, “and we won’t have to stop and investigate them.”  
  
“Unless we want to,” Draco said, since Granger need not feel as though she was taking over the world.  
  
Granger flashed him a look of irritation that Draco drank like sweet wine. “Yes, unless we want to,” she said, and shook her head. “I wish I knew  _what_ this meant. I wish I knew where these people had gone.”  
  
“Look at this.”  
  
It was Weasley’s voice, of all the voices, and Harry came up and away from the spiral, which he had been studying in turn, as though someone had jerked on a leash. Draco kept track of that, and the spinning emotions in the bond, as they all ran towards Weasley. It was all very well for Harry to leap like that in the middle of a potentially dangerous situation, but would he rally as fast to Draco’s tone if  _Draco_ was the one who spoke? Draco thought not.  
  
Weasley stood next to what looked like a large notch in the ground, as though a chunk of the hillside had simply been removed. Draco knelt so he could look more closely at the edges of the broken grass roots sticking out. They were withered and brown, but he didn’t think they were recently so. This notch had the feeling of something that had happened long ago, like the pictures in the walls.  
  
But like the pictures in the walls, like the edges of the silver oval, no weathering had marked them.  
  
“Don’t you  _see_?” Weasley’s voice was low, and he gestured towards the center of the notch. “Don’t you see?”  
  
Harry shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate. There’s no silver in the center of it, is there?” He was glancing around constantly at all of them, Draco saw, turning his head from side to side as though it were hard to count to three. His eyes would linger on them and then move on, rapid as hawks.  
  
 _He thinks we might be in danger. This is the way he looks when he’s protecting someone._  
  
Draco tried to debate whether he was more honored to be included in that protection or more annoyed that Harry would decide he couldn’t take care of himself, but was distracted by the way Weasley practically snarled at him.  
  
“Most of the things that lived here  _could probably fly_ ,” he said.  
  
“Yes, we know that,” Draco drawled, liking the way Weasley looked at him. Maybe it would lead to Weasley lunging and punching him, and Harry would see, all on his own and through no fault of Draco’s, that there was just no working with some people. “What makes you think the people who lived here could, though?”  
  
“Look at it from above,” Weasley said roughly, and then nodded to Harry, who was already aloft, using another tendril of wind to scoop Draco up. Draco scowled until he noticed that Weasley and Granger were staying on the ground. He could put up with them coming along if he still received special treatment.  
  
Harry came to a stop above the center of the notch, and Draco hung beside him, staring. From this height, it was obvious that it was something like an arrow, though not the shape Draco would have associated with one. And it was obvious that it aimed north.  
  
 _How did Weasley see that, when he was standing on the ground?_  
  
A lucky guess, maybe, but Draco didn’t think so. Weasley had been able to think his way through the problem, coming up with a way to imagine it from above, and thus to know the best way to convince them.  
  
When they came back to the earth and Granger and Harry started chattering excitedly about what it might mean, Draco did something that was a private gesture, a  _private_ way of acknowledging what Weasley had shown them. It would prove to himself, to no one else, because no one else would understand it or credit him with doing something like this, that he was gracious and not blind to other people’s merit, even people who had been feuding with his family for generations.  
  
He waited until Weasley was studying the notch with his arms folded and didn’t seem set to notice anything else but the proof of his own genius. Then he bowed to him, a half-bow with his hands stretched out in front of him.  
  
Weasley caught it, damn him.  
  
He looked up at once, his hand flashing to his wand, and then just stood and stared at Draco. Draco stood there, staring back, not biting his lip only because he refused to look like a  _child._ He was better than he had been, he repeated to himself, more mature, able to tolerate Harry’s friends. It would have been so much easier if he hadn’t had to, if perhaps he and Harry had come to Hurricane by themselves and not with his friends in tow. So much easier if they had gone on this journey by themselves.  
  
But then they might not have seen the significance of the notch. And it was information they needed to know.  
  
So, with Weasley looking at him and eyes so wide and questioning that Draco wanted to scratch himself, Draco did the bow again. With more purpose, this time, and a longer-lasting determination. They were allies, right? They  _had_ to be. So he had to ensure, for his own sake, that Weasley would not find him wanting as an ally.  
  
He straightened up from the bow and turned away, realizing that Harry and Granger had stopped their chatter to look at him. Weasley had a funny little smile on his face that Draco didn’t feel like facing right now.  
  
“Shall we go?” he asked.


	16. Like a Map

Harry turned his head from side to side. They had settled down in a hollow between fairly large hills for the night; there was a pool of water for them, and even boulders to brace their backs against. Winds guarded the camp, strung from hilltop to hilltop like enormous fences, and Harry had arched more wind above in a protective dome. They were safe from most things, and would have advance notice even about birds attacking them. They were safe.  
  
But the fear still stalked up and down his spine, and hovered on his shoulder and hissed near his ear, and made him want to tear paper up just to hear the soothing sounds it would make.  
  
 _Go to sleep._  
  
Harry shuddered a little as the words whispered down the bond, and glanced at Draco. To all appearances, he lay asleep on one side of the dying fire. As Harry watched, though, he stirred, lifted his head, and glared at him. Then he made an imperative summoning motion with his curved hand, and Harry crossed the grass to kneel down in front of him.  
  
Draco grasped the back of his neck and tugged him into a kiss. Harry struggled not to make noise that would wake up Ron and Hermione. They were curled up in the same set of blankets, but they only held each other, and snored, and he thought they really  _were_ asleep.  
  
“Draco!” he whispered aloud.  
  
 _Use the bond to talk to me, if you’re so concerned about your little friends,_ Draco hissed at him, and flung his leg around Harry’s waist, bearing him down, tugging him close, reaching for his cock and twisting it until Harry hissed in turn and batted his hand away.  _You’re being ridiculous. Nothing trailed us from the place with the silver oval. I’m sure that_ one  _of us would have spotted it._  
  
Sprawled on the grass with Draco’s hands roughly jerking at his clothes, Harry found the ability to smile into the earth tickling his cheek.  _You’re still pissed that Ron spotted that notch pointing north before you did, aren’t you?_  
  
 _It was a remarkable feat of observation,_ Draco said, and shoved himself up on an elbow to glare at Harry. He had a smear of dirt around his lip that Harry wanted to preserve for the sheer rarity of anything like that, but of course Draco felt the thought and swabbed irritably at it with one hand, knocking it off.  _Which means that I should have been the one to perform it._  
  
 _You’re quite remarkable all by yourself,_ Harry said, and squirmed around into a more comfortable position, getting his hand into the act at the same time.  
  
Stroked, wanked, Draco shut his eyes and tilted his head backwards, yielding to the pull of Harry’s hand. Harry liked to watch him like that, and not just because it was a rare chance to see Draco giving in. His hair fluttered with his soft, short breaths, and he tilted his head further and further back, while his hands went loose around Harry’s waist. Harry licked his left hand and brought it down.  
  
“Oh,  _fuck_!” Draco said, which made Ron and Hermione stir in their blankets and murmur something that might have been a question.  
  
Harry hissed reassuringly back at them, and kept his eyes and his hands full of Draco. Draco was jerking in place now, leaning forwards to plow into Harry’s palm and wrist. Harry gave one final pull, turning his left hand and right hand in the same direction, and Draco leaned on his shoulder and came.  
  
In the silence after that, Harry cleaned Draco up and tucked him back in. He wondered what he could say, if he  _should_ say anything, and then decided there was no need. Draco would feel his  _enormous_ smugness coming down the bond, and that was enough.  
  
Not for Draco, though, it seemed. His eyes flashed open and he hauled on Harry’s shoulders, spilling him down and backwards. Before Harry thought to struggle, Draco had arranged them so that Harry was sitting with his back against Draco’s chest, his arms pinned against his chest by one of Draco’s, and Draco’s hands tugging and swearing and fumbling around him.  
  
Harry could have broken free easily, especially since Draco had only one arm to hold his and the winds waited breathless in the air around him, ready to strike. But why should he? He tilted his head back, and yielded, feeling a deliciousness in the way his muscles relaxed, like flowing water.  
  
Draco’s breath stuttered in his ear, and then Draco said,  _You’ve never yielded that way even when I fucked you.  
  
Mmmm. _Harry turned his head and brushed his cheek up and down Draco’s, feeling as languorous as a great cat with a fire of its own.  _But this time, I want to._  
  
And he remained still-limbed and passive, and felt what it did to Draco, how his hands went slack several times, as if he  _wanted_ so much that he could barely remember to touch Harry. His breath hummed in and out of his lungs as Draco stroked him, caressed him, held him close, and his orgasm was slow in the coming but more violent than usual, breaking him out and wringing him against Draco.  
  
Draco nuzzled his cheek, his hands everywhere, sliding on Harry’s chest as he cleaned Harry up with a charm. Harry, who had used his winds to dry Draco and blow the crusted bits away, snorted and circled himself into Draco’s arms.  
  
Around them, the barriers of wind were firm from hilltop to hilltop. The wind roaring through the sky had dropped, and in all that vast heaven and haven of Hurricane, Harry could feel no storm building.  
  
“There,” Draco said, satisfaction and exhaustion both strong in his voice. “Now go to sleep.”  
  
Harry never knew if he heard those last words in reality, or if his brain had managed to supply them, as he and Draco slid together into longing, into lounging, into liquid, leaning against each other.  
  
*  
  
Draco woke the next morning to find Weasley staring at him.  
  
Draco stared back, lifting his head to look around the camp. Granger was still asleep beside the fire, he saw, and was vaguely surprised. He had thought she and Weasley slept so tightly twined together that Weasley wouldn’t be able to move without waking her. And Harry was with him, the bond as limp in his mind as a fishing line trailing from a broken pole. Draco let his hands rest on Harry’s shoulders and whispered, “What?”  
  
“Try to make a  _little_ less noise next time,” Weasley whispered back, and walked towards the fire, opening the satchel they had brought along that held the food.  
  
Draco felt his face flush, but he also had to smile. What he and Harry had done was only what Weasley and Granger would have liked to do, if they had thought they could get away with it.  
  
He shook Harry gently. Harry rolled over at once, waking immediately the way he always did, but this time, unlike most, he didn’t start to his feet and look around for a threat. He smiled up at Draco, open, heartbreaking, relaxed, and his winds gathered at the nape of Draco’s neck and tugged him gently down for a kiss hello.  
  
Draco went, ignoring the way that Weasley kept his back resolutely turned on the other side of the fire. Draco couldn’t really blame him for that. He probably would have done the same thing if Weasley and Granger had been going at it.  
  
But for Harry to be doing this in front of his friends, even if he didn’t  _know_ right now that they had heard them…  
  
 _I can hear that kind of thing from your mind in the same way you can hear it from mine._ Harry snorted and lazily wrapped his real hand around Draco’s neck, fingers working in and out of his hair in a way that made Draco’s eyes shut in pleasure.  _It doesn’t matter, Draco. I wanted to enjoy you. I got to._  
  
And that was it, really, that Harry could represent them both unblushing, uncaring about what Weasley and Granger thought. Draco got hard again, and thrust against Harry’s arse until Harry shut his eyes and laughed.  
  
“Not this morning,” he said, and rolled away from Draco, leaving Draco to cover himself up hastily as Weasley glanced their way. “I hope that you don’t mind, but I should check the wind barriers and go aloft to make sure no storms are blocking our way.” He flung Draco a final steamy glance, and Weasley a wave, and the newly-awakened Granger a smile, and then himself upwards. Draco watched him rise, feeling the wild magic weaving around him until it nearly swallowed Harry up in wreaths of protection.  
  
Only then did he cast a charm that would will his erection down whether it wanted to go or not, adjust his trousers, and stand up. Granger glanced at him as he did.  
  
“You could have made a little less noise,” she said, and yawned into her hands as she pushed her fluffy, frizzy morning hair back and forth on her head. It made sounds when she did that which Draco could only shudder at.  
  
“The next time, go ahead and make all the noise that you want,” Draco said generously as he strode off to find a patch of grass he could piss on. “It’s only fair.”  
  
That made them both blush and shut their mouths, a satisfactory combination. Draco grinned as he rounded one of the boulders. He could do with relief for his mind as well as his bladder.  
  
*  
  
The silver ovals appeared again and again as they made their way north. And so did the notches at the front of the small areas that seemed to mark the way north, pointing.  
  
Harry had an argument with Hermione about whether those were really arrows when the people, or creatures, that had lived on Hurricane had no reason to attach significance to that shape. It was Hermione’s position that it didn’t really matter whether they could have  _called_ them arrows, or assigned that shape to them; they were functioning that way anyway, guiding anyone who came behind along the path to their destination.  
  
Harry thought they might mean something different, but everyone else outvoted them, and they kept along the straight track.  
  
The plains were beginning to change, the grass becoming shorter and the ground hillier and more rolling. Harry squinted at what looked like a line of dark mist along the northern horizon about noon, and sent his winds to try and see if they could disperse it. They couldn’t, and a few minutes of flight later, everyone could see it for themselves.  
  
“It’s mountains,” Hermione breathed, leaning out of her chair until Harry used a strap of wind like a belt to fix her in place. Hermione gave him a reproachful look for that, which Harry glared back at. He wasn’t about to have her fall on  _his_ watch. “ _Real_ mountains. I thought we’d left them behind forever when we came here.”  
  
 _Real mountains,_ Draco echoed in Harry’s mind.  _Awfully regular, for real mountains. I would have assumed the winds of Hurricane would have had time to work on them, and wear them down._  
  
Harry shrugged uneasily as he studied the jagged shoulders of rock ahead of them, dark enough to be basalt. They thrust aggressively up into the sky. Maybe the people, or creatures, who had left those silver ovals could have known what an arrow shape was after all, if they had seen these.  _The winds of Hurricane are magical. They might not work in the same way as Earth winds when it comes to wearing things down._  
  
Draco snorted, but since neither of them had any convincing argument, it remained on the level of a mental disagreement as they flew closer and closer.  
  
Harry watched the crags for the signs of birds’ nests. He was expecting them to rise up continually as they flew and flew, and his shoulders tightened as they didn’t. He could hear Draco jeering in the back of his head about Harry’s disappointment when  _no_ danger came along, but he ignored that. He could tell Draco was as nervous as he was, if for different reasons.  
  
“You don’t think that this is where the thing in the north lives?” Ron asked suddenly, one of Harry’s winds obediently capturing the words and bringing them up to him. “It’s in the north, after all, and it looks forbidding enough.”  
  
Harry shrugged again, and aimed them slightly west of north. There was something different about the mountains there, and he wanted to get a glimpse of what it was.  
  
They saw when they get high enough, though if they had been riding the winds among the peaks themselves, Harry doubted they would have. The mountain peaks surrounded a deep, jagged bowl, a hollow really, which plunged straight down into darkness, instead of bending and twisting like a normal valley.  
  
 _What the fuck do you know about normal valleys?_ Draco said this time.  
  
 _You could find a less irritating way to vent your irritation,_ Harry said, and bent his head to the side. No, there was no lake at the bottom, or river, although he had expected to find one. Down there was nothing but withered dust and stone, kept from the sunlight so long that nothing could grow there.  
  
“What  _is_ it?” Hermione asked, once again leaning out of her chair. Harry adjusted her position absentmindedly, and shook his head.  
  
“I would say that it’s a place where something was scooped out,” Harry said. “But that leads to the question of what would have been there to leave such a great hole. Another mountain?”  
  
“ _That’s_ all you can think about, when you phrased it that way?” Draco asked flatly. “Because  _my_ first thought is: Who scooped it?”  
  
“Or  _what_ ,” Ron said.  
  
“Thank you for making it all the more creepy, Weasley,” Draco snapped, and folded his arms around himself. Harry coiled warm winds about his neck and shoulders, although he knew that he wasn’t really cold. Draco gave him a narrow-eyed look, a nod, and a slight thawing of the cold bond between them, in approximately that order. Harry turned away so he could hide his smile.  
  
“I don’t know what did it,” Hermione said. “But I think it might be the thing that we’re going to meet.”  
  
Since she had said what they were all thinking, no one disagreed aloud. Harry saw Ron glance back at the southern horizon, though, and knew that he was wishing they didn’t have to do this. Harry smiled at him. “Remember the basilisk,” he said. “And the way we went after the Philosopher’s Stone. That turned out all right.”  
  
 _What?_ Draco hummed in the back of his mind, and started searching for the relevant memories. Harry ignored the rifling. At least it wasn’t as painful as the Legilimency that Snape had used to search his mind.  
  
“Yeah,” Ron said. “But we had some idea of what we were facing, there. We have no idea what this thing is.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “I know it seems like we did. But remember how many of the professors’ traps were surprises, and that we knew what the basilisk was but not what it would really be like. I think that’s the difference. This isn’t much more dangerous, but it does seem that way because we’re older and more cautious. What?” he added, because Ron was gaping at him.  
  
Ron shut his mouth and shrugged. “I just never thought I’d hear common sense from you, that’s all. Or philosophy. I was surprised.”  
  
“Harry’s not stupid.”  
  
Harry turned slowly in midair to stare at Draco, who had spoken the words. Draco stared back at him with flat eyes and gave a small shrug that made Harry want to roll his eyes.  _You know that’s not what he meant,_ he settled for saying instead.  _And that you’re getting along with him better than that, and not you’re sullen just to be sullen._  
  
“I know you didn’t mean it that way, Ron,” Harry said aloud. “Anyway. We’ve come this far. A bit silly to go back when we have no idea what’s threatening the mummidade, and whether it would threaten us or not.”  
  
Ron made a skeptical sound, but he was in the chair, leaning back as if relaxed, as Harry led them around that hole in the mountains. Hermione was looking thoughtful, and had actually pulled out parchment and a quill to scribble with. Harry thought he’d heard her mutter a Sticking Charm to make sure the quill stayed on her hand, and he smiled. That was his friends, always the same loyal people although the world changed.  
  
 _Literally.  
  
You can stop praising them any time you like.  
  
You _know  _he didn’t mean it that way,_ Harry said, glancing back at Draco, who deliberately hovered somewhere between him and the chairs carrying Ron and Hermione, glaring at him but coming no nearer.  _What’s the matter? Did something else happen that I didn’t notice?_ He would have thought that impossible, with the bond connecting them the way it did, but God knew that he had missed important events in his friends’ lives before this.  
  
 _It isn’t—he just had no right to sound surprised that you can speak the truth and common sense sometimes._ Draco drifted sideways with his arms folded, and although the winds caught him up and started him moving with the rest of them a moment later, he still maintained the almost still position.  
  
 _You would have agreed with him, a few months ago when we first came here._ Harry hesitated before calling it “months,” but he still wasn’t sure what other timeframe to use. Hurricane had an apparently endless spring, and they had known the seasons wouldn’t be an accurate measure of Earth time.  
  
 _That has nothing to do with it._  
  
It apparently didn’t, and the best Harry could do was lift his hands for peace and retreat. He didn’t get the way Draco was reacting, but he understood the sudden fits of anger that had sometimes come between them, and he had no wish to provoke one now.  
  
*  
  
 _This is so bloody dangerous._  
  
Draco had even sent that thought to Harry a few times, but received no acknowledgment. He didn’t think Harry was refusing to respond, so much as thinking so much of the same thing himself and concentrating so hard on the journey ahead of them that the thought blended into the background noise of his mind.  
  
Draco shook his head. The terms of their alliance with the mummidade didn’t require them to walk, or fly, straight into danger and offer themselves up as willing sacrifices. He wished that Harry had come up with some other way to tackle this.  
  
On the other hand, what way was there? They couldn’t wait for news from other people, or send someone expendable and hope they would report back. This was the other side of being the important, the invaluable, defenders of the camp that he and Harry were. They had no one else competent to go and face the danger.  
  
In the end, Draco could do nothing but sigh, and decide to keep alert. And not snap at Weasley about stupid things, because it only made Harry upset and weakened the bonds of their group. Perhaps Weasley had meant no more than the kind of rough teasing that he also seemed to bestow on Granger.  
  
 _Although if he shows any sign of being attracted to Harry…_  
  
Harry laughed at him, and Draco went back to paying attention to the route.  
  
They passed several more of the scooped-out hollows, but otherwise it was mountains that flowed beneath them—mountains with no valleys, peaks packed close together as though to bar the way to something. Draco wondered if someone had put them there for just such a reason, and ended up shaking his head. They had encountered no one so far on Hurricane with the power to do that. The birds and the winds were mindless, and if the mummidade could have done that, they would probably have the power to protect themselves from the birds, too.  
  
Harry finally called a halt when the sky had begun to turn blue around the edges. Draco wondered where they would camp, but Harry turned to the west and found them a foothill carpeted with some small, smooth patches of grass. They could take shelter among boulders and drink from a stream of water, at least.  
  
Granger spent much of the time while the food cooked scribbling, but she didn’t show them what she was doing until the end of the meal. Then she handed the parchment to Weasley and fell on the untouched food in front of her with something like exhaustion and satisfaction mingling in her face.  
  
“What is it?” Weasley asked, and held out the parchment to Draco, as though he was the only one who could make sense of Granger’s handwriting.  
  
Stifling the temptation to say that this proved that Weasley thought Harry was stupid, because he hadn’t offered the parchment to  _him_ , Draco bent over and looked. He ended up shaking his head, though. Granger had drawn the diagram of ovals and lines that they had seen in the ruins; she had either a much better memory than Draco had thought, or she had made a copy of it at the time. “What about it?”  
  
“Don’t you see?” Granger looked up, ignoring the curious way Harry looked at her. Draco wondered whether Harry was as much a stranger to his two best friends as it seemed, and how they had stayed friends in the face of all that.  
  
 _Because I know how to be flexible._  
  
Draco would have sent back a wicked pun on the last word, but Granger was continuing. “The position of the ovals corresponds to the position of those holes in the mountains.”  
  
Draco stared at her. Then he said, “But that map, if that was what it was, showed many more ovals than we’ve seen hollows. And you can’t determine what the orientation of the map was, anyway, or what the distance between the points was meant to be, or—anything. Where are you getting this?”  
  
Granger turned her hand over. “I’ve told you what I believe. It  _remains_ what I believe. I’m sure that’s what it is. If you work it out on a certain scale, then the distances are right. And the ovals are roughly the same shape as the hollows.”  
  
“If you work it out on a certain scale, Harry and I are cousins to everyone else on Earth,” Draco said. “Because it’s all incest if you go back far enough, isn’t that right? And the ovals could be the holes, and they could be anything else that you want them to be. Because  _we don’t know the bloody key,_ Granger. We don’t even know the shape of the lock.”  
  
Granger shrugged and wrapped her arms primly around her legs. “I know what I saw.”  
  
Draco opened his mouth to continue arguing, and then the surge of fear down the bond from Harry sent him bounding to his feet. Harry turned back to them, and Draco realized it wasn’t fears of being called stupid or lack of interest that had made him stay silent. His face was pale, his hair rippling with the rising breeze.  
  
“A storm’s coming,” he said briefly. “And this one is going to be worse than any we’ve seen since we’ve been here.”


	17. A Mighty Blow

“We have to make preparations.”  
  
Harry was the one who said that, and Draco was the one who nodded, rising to his feet. “I can cut some of the stones apart,” he said, his voice gentle and his attention so focused on Harry that Harry felt it strengthen and calm him even more than the bond was already doing. “Would it help us to shelter under them?”  
  
Harry half-turned, considering. Then he shook his head. “Can you cut larger slabs? Ones that would be difficult for even me to lift?” He widened the bond and sent more emotions down it—there were no other words for the process—to give Draco a notion of how much weight his winds would be able to take.  
  
Draco cocked his head and thought about that, then said, “I can. Do you think that will be enough to keep the wild magic from lifting them?”  
  
Harry smiled grimly. “I hope so. I want to say that I  _know_ so, but I can only feel the distant strength of these winds, not the way they’ll be when they get here.” Then he groaned and bowed his head into his hands.  
  
“Harry.” Draco was there, although Harry hadn’t felt him cross the distance between them, laying his hands on Harry’s shoulders. His claws drifted above them, as harmless as blades of grass until Draco told them to cut. “What is it? Is the wind hurting you? Do you need to cut the connection in order to survive?”  
  
“I’m not sure that I  _could_ cut the connection, now,” Harry admitted, lifting his head and shaking it. “No, I was groaning at my own stupidity. Why are we talking about piling up slabs of stone? We’re in the  _mountains_ , and they’re less likely to be vulnerable to the strokes of the wind than any pile of cut rocks could be.” He found himself smiling, and Draco smiled back, stroking down his shoulders as though admiring the shape of the bones. “Draco, can you make us a cave?”  
  
Draco bowed. “Not only can, but will.” He turned around, and his fingers spread out, flaring. The claws hissed and sliced; Harry thought he could hear the air whining, too, as it was cut. Harry wondered for a moment whether the rock in the mountains would prove to be too tough for Draco. He didn’t think that was an unreasonable fear when, after all, the mountains hadn’t been worn down by all the winds that cut across them no matter how hard.  
  
But it was unreasonable, after all. A chunk of stone fell out, arched and curved like a door, and then Draco began hammering into the rock behind that, making a tunnel.  
  
Harry nodded and turned to Ron and Hermione, only to pause when he saw their open mouths. “What?” he asked, turning his head. If the winds had already risen somehow, then that would mean that he’d lost some of his connection to the wild magic, since he hadn’t felt them coming closer.  
  
“You just work together so  _well_ ,” Ron whispered.  
  
Hermione nodded. “Why isn’t Malfoy like that when it comes to defending the camp?”  
  
“Malfoy can still hear you,” Draco said, stepping back as if to examine his work, shaking his head a moment later, and lashing out with both fists at once. The rock fell from the sides of the cave, crumbled into pieces as Draco flashed and sliced, and became dust with a few more slices. Harry sprang to life and sent winds to blowing out the pebbles so that Draco didn’t have to waste more time cutting them up.  
  
“Because he’s with people who appreciate him, here, and he has me to protect, too,” Harry said quietly, and turned away to watch Draco again. He wanted to be sure that Draco knew his friends hadn’t meant to sound disrespectful.  
  
 _They can’t help it,_ Draco said.  _It’s implicit in the nature of their relationship with me._  
  
 _I thought they didn’t have any relationship with you.  
  
Exactly._ Draco stepped back, held his hands out in front of him one more time, and launched a shudder of wild magic that Harry could feel in his veins. His own fingers ached with it, but he heard the final roar and tumble of some boulder back in the newly-created cavern, and a moment later his winds were floating things out. Harry touched Draco’s arm, not needing the bond to  _feel_  the fact that the cave was ready.  
  
“Come on,” Harry told his friends. “We can discuss this, and worry about it, later. For now, we have a storm to get out of.” And he ducked into the cave with Ron and Hermione right behind him, and Draco acting as rearguard, whispering into his mind.  
  
 _You’re more of a hero after all than I knew. You love the big dramatic exit line.  
  
And you love the fact that you can do something to help, _Harry retorted, waiting until Draco had stepped in, and then floating a boulder towards the entrance. He left enough space for a small breeze to travel in and out, to link them with the outside world and give him news of the storm.  _You’re more of a hero than anyone knew._  
  
Draco sniffed, but didn’t disagree. Perhaps he might have, though, if Ron hadn’t interrupted. “Mate,” he whispered, his face a little green in the  _Lumos_ that he’d conjured on the end of his wand. “What happens if the winds sling a lot of boulders across the cave mouth and we get trapped in here?”  
  
Harry shook his head. “Boulders heavy enough that I can’t lift them? Then Draco will be the one to cut through the rocks and save us.” He stepped sideways enough that his shoulder bumped Draco’s. “The winds might be able to affect my magic, but they can’t affect his.”  
  
“Even though they gave it to him in the first place?” Hermione looked at them thoughtfully. “I wish we knew more about how the wild magic of Hurricane worked. You had it before you even came here, Harry, and that means that you’re more akin to the winds. But they gave Draco magic, too. And maybe Ginny, if the way she can talk to the bird is any inclination. Why not the rest of us?”  
  
 _Maybe you don’t deserve it._  
  
Draco didn’t speak those words aloud, which Harry thought was a sign of how grown-up and mature he had become. He let his shoulder continue to rest against Draco’s, and said aloud, “Maybe the process is as random as the patterns of the winds are.”  
  
“There has to be a key  _somewhere_ ,” Hermione said. “The way there is to those maps of the ovals.” She sat down and took out her quill and parchment again. Harry reckoned he had no need to ask what  _she_ was writing.   
  
“What—” Ron started to ask.  
  
And then the storm hit.  
  
Harry thought later it was like a thunderclap in the suddenness with which it arrived, but that was only true if thunder came from every direction and had no beginning and no ending. The scream of the wind and the rain was strong, but stronger still was the magic, pushing at the boulder over the doorway, pushing at the rock of the mountain, pushing at Harry’s mind until he thought his skull would burst outwards from the pressure. He bowed his head and crouched there, his hands over his ears, his panting so loud that he couldn’t hear anything over that, even the hum of the bond.  
  
But he could  _feel_ it, oh yes. This was the largest storm he had ever felt since they came to Hurricane, and the winds were whirled away from him and into the depths of the sky, where they screamed in ecstasy as the storm danced with them.  
  
The wild magic leaped in his veins, leaped and surged and soared, and Harry wondered if all his blood would come pouring out in a desperate attempt to join the storm. He reached down and covered his arms with his hands, but he knew that was futile if it really did want to come out. He laughed despairingly.  
  
Draco was beside him, though, his hand closing down on Harry’s as if he wanted to break the fingers.  _You are not the magic,_ he said in Harry’s head, and the shout was loud enough to cut through the pressure of the storm at last.  _You are you. You are not the wild magic, even if you do use it too much!_  
  
From the sound of it, he had shouted that more than once. Harry took in a shaking breath, and nodded. He could feel the yell of the blood in his veins and the bursting in his chest more clearly than ever, but if he bit his lip and thought about it, he could still that. When it came down to his body, Draco was right. He was human, and contained in skin.  
  
“Now that you’re all right,” Draco said, and leaned back from him, “can you tell what direction the storm’s coming from?”  
  
Harry winced at the thought of letting his mind back out unprotected into all that wildness, but Draco’s eyes were implacable, and rationally, Harry knew he was right. There was no reason to sit here cowering when he might have to encounter other storms like this and let his mind venture out, too. Cautiously, he reached out now to see if he could sense the winds.  
  
The narrow tunnel he had left around the side of the boulder felt like a dangerous gulf, and he had to concentrate to avoid his own consciousness skittering after the winds into the vault of heaven, but he thought he could sense a tension stretched across the sky. He shook his head. “It covers the whole mountains.”  
  
Draco cursed, softly and steadily. Then he said, “Do you think the enemy we’re hunting sent this to stop us?”  
  
“That would depend on knowing the enemy’s power and location,” Harry said, and smiled at him. He was feeling along the outer edges of the skein that covered the mountains, to see if he could locate where it ended and if it was extending over the plains, in the direction of Teddy and the rest, but the power drove him down when he ventured too much. He had to stay near the ground and look up at it instead. “But I suppose it’s possible. If it can send birds, it could send this.”  
  
“I almost wish I could be out in it.”  
  
Harry started, and then realized that the words hadn’t come from Draco, the way he assumed. They came from Hermione instead, who leaned forwards and looked at the boulder that blocked the cave with a nameless yearning in her eyes.  
  
It was Ron who snorted and said the words Harry wouldn’t say and had been afraid Draco  _would_. “You’re mad, Hermione. You know the storm would destroy you the minute you set foot in it.”  
  
Hermione rolled her head over to look at him. “But just think about the knowledge we could learn,” she whispered. “The way the magic could help us!”  
  
Ron knelt down in front of her and took her chin in his hand. “I know,” he said firmly. “But there’s really no reason to think that we would get immediate or useful magic. Harry’s took a while to get stronger, and Malfoy’s took a while to develop. Think about what’s in front of us, not what could be.”  
  
It took a second, but the glaze faded from Hermione’s eyes, and she nodded. Harry reached over, squeezing Ron’s shoulder, before he faced the boulder again and wove a barrier of wind behind it that should at least warn them if something tore it away. He had no hopes of being able to chain the boulder to the earth if the storm decided to make it fly.  
  
“Draco, can you help me make this place more comfortable?” he asked, and then glanced around and realized that Draco was kneeling and staring at the boulder with eyes glazed the same way Hermione’s had been. “Draco?”  
  
He called along the bond before he got a response. Draco shook his head slowly and turned to him. “I can cut the stone so we can have little hollows to sleep in,” he said. “I can’t promise that we’re going to be comfortable. Maybe Weasley and Granger know better Cushioning Charms than I do.”  
  
Harry nodded, and reached out through the bond again.  _Are you all right?  
  
Perfectly. Just thinking.  
  
_The heaviness of those thoughts seemed to show that that wasn’t true, but Harry didn’t know what more he could ask. He would know if Draco had been lying, after all. He smiled, and moved out of the way so that Draco could cut the stone floor of the cave into sleeping holes for the lot of them.  
  
*  
  
As his hands moved, Draco’s mind was on the call he heard from the storm.  
  
Because he had no doubt that it  _was_ a call. Nothing like the way the magic had hammered Harry when it first began, but a single strong, steady sound, threading through all the other sounds that could have blocked it, reaching for Draco, telling him to come out.  
  
Now that Draco thought about it, he decided that he heard it before—when they were by the sea, and as they traveled north. Perhaps that was what had made him so unusually short and snappish with Harry.  
  
 _And with Harry’s friends?_  
  
Yes. The call was definite about that. He was to come, and bring Harry, but leave everyone else behind. They wouldn’t be able to keep up with the wild flight that the voice, and the storm through it, demanded of them.  
  
Draco shivered, and shook his head. He had heard the call, but he would be stupid to obey. Why  _would_ he, in fact? What was there to be gained from following something so obviously timed to make him do something idiotic? He valued not being an idiot, and the bond he had with Harry, more than he valued the chance to obey something so stupid.  
  
 _But you find it compelling, nonetheless._  
  
Of course he did, Draco answered himself viciously, while he swept his hands back and forth and the hollows continued to appear in the stone, and then he swept them back the other way and the small slivers of stone that unpeeled from the sides of the hollows disintegrated. He wasn’t such an idiot not to recognize the likeness of the call to his dreams of flying with Harry and leaving everyone behind. The only thing the call had given him that was different than he’d had before was a direction.  
  
 _And what about all the other times that you had the same thought?_  
  
Draco paused. Now that  _was_ disturbing, to think that whatever this creature was, it’d been influencing him before now, and that his dreams weren’t his own.  
  
“I think those are big enough now, Draco.”  
  
Draco looked up at the gentle tone in Harry’s voice, in time to see Weasley and Granger press back against the wall of the cave, staring at him. They were watching the hollows in the floor and the way his claws were moving back and forth—which they could see by the stripes appearing in the stone, Draco realized, even though his claws themselves were invisible. With difficulty, he pulled himself to a stop and shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said.  
  
 _Right,_ came down the bond, but on the outside, Harry nodded, accepting his excuse for what it sounded like. “Fine,” he echoed. “Then we’ll do what we can for fire, and then I think we ought to get some rest.”  
  
“Are you sure, Harry?” Weasley’s face was serious in the flickering light of the  _Lumos_ Charms. “What happens if we need to get up and move quickly? If we’re sound asleep, we might not hear the alarm.”  
  
Harry grinned with his lips pulled back from his teeth. “You’ll hear the alarm that I make, I promise,” he said. “In the meantime, I think it’s better for us to get what rest we can. We’ll react more quickly that way.”  
  
Neither Weasley nor Granger had much fault to find with that, it seemed, and there was a little discussion about whether they should burn anything in their packs or simply conjure a fire to burn on air, which would take more energy. In the end, Draco, tiring of the talk, conjured a fire himself, and they roasted the last of the rabbit-meat on it and then lay down in their hollows.  
  
Well, Weasley and Granger did. Draco stood up, and Harry followed him to the corner of the cave nearest the boulder that blocked the entrance. Draco listened to the wind singing outside, and wondered if it was his imagination or the truth that it had died down a bit.   
  
“What was happening earlier?” Harry leaned back against the wall and gave him an even stare.  
  
Draco swallowed. He had reckoned that Harry couldn’t hear the call through the storm that so plagued him, but he had grown so used to everything that passed through his mind being shared at once, the confirmation was still a little unnerving.   
  
 _I felt something calling to me,_ he said across the bond. He would take no chance on Weasley and Granger hearing this and deciding he was mad.  _A voice that urged me to take you and come to it._  
  
Harry half-shut his eyes.  _Which direction?_  
  
 _North, but not pure north,_ Draco admitted.  _Perhaps a little to the west from here, towards that place where we saw the big silver flash earlier._  The flash had caused debate in their little group about whether it was another silver oval, or perhaps a lake or ocean, but they hadn’t had time to investigate with twilight coming on.  
  
 _I see._  
  
Draco resisted the urge to fling up his hands, too. That would probably attract Granger and Weasley’s attention, which was the last thing he wanted. They would be curious enough about Draco and Harry speaking silently, Draco thought, and was grateful that they wouldn’t be able to tell what he and Harry were saying no matter how much they might want to.  _I didn’t go to it. I told you the truth._  
  
 _You did. But it makes me wonder what was doing the calling._ Harry turned and faced the far side of the cavern as though he could see through stone and air and to the source and heart of the mystery, which Draco doubted he would manage.  _I’ve never felt anything like it, but my bond with the wild magic is different from yours.  
  
_ Draco frowned.  _What do you mean by that?  
  
I mean that I had mine before coming here, as Hermione reminded me. It grew and changed on Hurricane, but it didn’t start here. _Harry glanced thoughtfully at him.  _You and Ginny and Teddy are the ones who’ve adapted to Hurricane, and Teddy’s too young to really tell us what he feels. Ginny, maybe, but her magic isn’t as fully developed as yours._  
  
Draco nodded, mollified that he had added that qualifier to the list he planned to put Draco in.  
  
 _So perhaps it’s different. Perhaps you can hear a voice calling you that I can’t, or perhaps Ginny and Teddy would hear it if they were in the same point of the process as you are._ Harry laid a hand on Draco’s shoulder, and Draco blinked, surprised at the image of a chain that came down the bond with it.  _Just remember that the rest of us are still here, all right? Don’t go without consulting me.  
  
As if I would, _Draco said, and sawed his hand back and forth between them, not really tugging on the bond but making his point.   
  
Harry bit his lip.  _I think of those silver ovals. I think of the ruins, a civilization abandoned.  
  
And? _Draco asked, because Harry stood there brooding and didn’t make any sense.  
  
 _I wonder if that’s what happened to the people, or beings, whatever you want to call them, who used to live around the silver ovals. I wonder if they felt the call and had to leave, because it wouldn’t let them stay where they were._  
  
Draco stood quite still for a moment, then shook his head impatiently.  _You’re thinking of too many ghost stories, Potter. They had time to build quite a respectable civilization here, or at least leave the remains of one. We haven’t been here more than a few months, and I feel the call? It’s too short a time period._  
  
 _Well, perhaps,_ Harry said, as though he hated the sound of anything pressing in and stealing his precious theory.  _But I still don’t like it. Think carefully about what the voice says, and report it to me if you can.  
  
You’ll know as soon as I hear it, as soon as I think about it.  
  
I couldn’t feel your thoughts before._  
  
Harry held his eyes for a little while, and then turned away. Draco followed him, more shaken than he wanted to admit. It  _was_ true that those thoughts about the call had somehow concealed themselves from Harry, when really they should have been as open and clear to him as any other thought that crossed Draco’s mind. Why?   
  
He didn’t know. But he would take Harry at his word, and be careful, and count on the bond between them to redeem his worst excesses.  
  
*  
  
Harry jerked. His eyes were open without his remembering what had made him open them, and he was lifting his head and turning it, trying to focus on something beyond the darkness, without being able to tell why.  
  
What was there? What had awakened him?  
  
Then he realized that there was no more pulling and tugging of the blood in his veins, and relaxed a little. The storm had ended, it seemed, and they were still safe in the cave. He tried to press his face back into Draco’s side. Draco stirred and muttered something, and Harry reckoned that he wouldn’t mind being used as a pillow as long as the edges of Harry’s glasses didn’t cut into any tender skin.  
  
And then he heard it.  
  
It was a gentle whisper, a pulling, tugging thread of sound that was nevertheless difficult to ignore. It wound into his mind, and Harry could feel the mind behind it, or almost, dancing up and down and whining. It said his name, and it said something about the wide plains and broad oceans of Hurricane, not in words but in terms that made him feel as if he were overhearing a conversation from somewhere, summoning him, leading him on.  
  
Harry became aware that Draco still lay still beneath him, snoring, and that he hadn’t felt any surge from Draco’s mind, any hint that he could sense what was happening.  
  
 _A call that comes separately. Something that can interfere with the bond._  
  
Harry flexed his hands in the stone. It was true that he hadn’t got used to sharing his mind with Draco completely, but he was close enough to it that he hated the thought that there was something he could hear that Draco couldn’t, and vice versa.  
  
 _Our enemy, maybe. Bodiless._  
  
That thought  _did_ wake Draco, or at least his breathing changed. He lifted his head and stared at Harry. “What?” he whispered.  
  
“I felt the call, too,” Harry said quietly, laying his hand over Draco’s heart. “Go back to sleep. I’m not going to answer it.”  
  
Draco’s breath and lips sharpened. “And did it say anything about bringing me?” he asked.  
  
Harry listened again, then shook his head.  
  
Draco nodded grimly, and fell asleep hanging onto Harry’s hand as though he wanted to imprint the shapes of Harry’s fingers on his palm. It was some time, after he had watched Draco’s profile and hands for long minutes, before Harry fell asleep himself.


	18. A Changed World

"What happened?"  
  
It was a simple question that Hermione asked, but Harry knew from the way she stared around ahead of her that it wouldn't have a simple answer. He pushed gently at Draco's shoulders; with Ron and Hermione, he had halted as he edged around the boulder, and since Harry was the last one to emerge from the cave, he couldn't see what they were all staring at yet.  
  
Then they stepped into the air, and Harry could see.  
  
There was a mass of stripped rock in front of them, instead of the mountains he had expected to see. The rock was flat, grey with striations of white, and no other color. No vegetation lurked there, no water, and the sides of the bowl loomed up into the sky.  
  
Harry turned and met Draco's eyes. Draco nodded. The bond functioned to link them even when they weren't actively trading thoughts. Harry knew what they would see if they flew right now: another one of those mysterious hollows in the mountains, where one of them had apparently been plucked into the air.  
  
"At least we know that there isn't necessarily a whole mountain vanishing when this happens," Draco said aloud. "This was a valley before we hid last night. Just not as big or wide as this one."  
  
"You don't find a storm that makes valleys  _scary_?" Ron turned towards Draco, staring at him as he pushed the hair out of his eyes. "What do you find scary, then? Other than losing Harry," he added, glancing back and forth between them and nodding wisely in a way that caused Harry to smile helplessly.  
  
"You wrong me, Weasley," Draco said, eyeing Ron in a fashion that made Harry a little nervous. "Of course I find the thought of losing Harry frightening." He nodded to Harry and sent along a quick little bolt of rose-colored warmth that made Harry want to touch his shoulders. "But even more, I find the thought of the voice that called to us last night frightening."  
  
Harry jolted back despite himself. He had never thought Draco would bring it up aloud.  
  
Silence. Hermione stood there with her hands folded in front of her, shoulders drawing into herself. Harry had been right in his half-suspicions, then; she'd heard the voice calling them. Ron simply stared around, as if trying to evaluate what direction an attack would come from first.  
  
"I'm right, aren't I?" Draco whispered harshly. "All of us were there. All of us  _heard_ it. Calling, demanding that we come. Promising that the storm wouldn't hurt us. Saying, in my case, that I should bring Harry with me, and in Harry's case, that he should come alone. I don't know what it said to you, Weasley, Granger, but something similar, I assume. And the direction was northwest."  
  
More silence. Then Ron said, "Did you hear that voice, Hermione?"  
  
Harry turned to face his best friends. If Ron thought Draco was taunting them, or lying, then Harry would defend him.  
  
Hermione just looked at Ron, though, swallowed, and said, "Yes. It told me to come alone, and promised that I would have all the knowledge I needed, knowledge that would save us and the camp and enable us to continue living on Hurricane. What did it say to you, Ron?"  
  
"Nothing at all," Ron said harshly. "I heard nothing."  
  
*  
  
Draco snorted despite himself. Weasley spun on him, but he was right; there wasn't much Draco was frightened of anymore, now that he had the wild magic to defend himself. He flexed his hands, reminding Weasley as much as himself of what he was now armed with, and shook his head. "Are you  _really_ going to dare it, Weasley?" he asked. "Come ahead and charge me, then."  
  
Weasley held himself back, but said, "I didn't hear any voice, and I want to know what it means that  _you_  did." His gaze included all of them, even Harry, under some umbrella of betrayal, and trust Harry to step forwards, as he did, with his hands extended and soothing words on his lips. Draco shoulder-blocked him back behind him and met Weasley's eyes unblinking.  
  
"You can tell us what it told you," he whispered. "The rest of us have, even Granger, who didn't know until now that someone else heard it. Harry and I told each other last night."  
  
Weasley shut his eyes. His face was red from scalp to neck now, and Draco thought he had never looked less attractive. He would have wondered what Granger saw in him, but that was obvious: a bulwark who would support her and never challenge her superiority. In honesty as in everything else, as they could see from the way Weasley had reacted to the mention of the voice.  
  
 _You think he's lying?_ Harry's voice in his head was as bright and astonished as a spring flower.  
  
 _Of course he is,_ Draco said, not taking his eyes from Weasley. So far, he hadn't actually reached for his wand, but it was probably only a small amount of time if Draco kept forcing him to face his stupidity.  _There's no reason for the voice to leave him out of the summons when it wanted to trap all of us.  
  
Unless he doesn't have wild magic yet._  
  
That made Draco pause. He had assumed that, if the magic had reached out to Granger, it would have done the same thing to Weasley.  
  
But it had reached for him and Harry before anyone else in the camp--or perhaps Harry before he ever came to Hurricane, to hear him and Granger tell it--and Teddy in a way that was undetectable. Then had come a long gap before the connection had formed with the youngest Weasley. Why not a delayed reaction in the way that Granger and her husband felt it?  
  
Draco frowned and eased back. "You really didn't feel anything or hear anything," he said to Weasley, willing to make it a question again if Weasley's eyes darted or he did anything else that showed he was lying.  
  
"I really didn't feel anything except fear that the storm was going to get us." Weasley turned in a slow circle, staring at all of them. "Maybe I  _should_ have been afraid that one of you would get the mad idea to wander out into it."  
  
"I had the mad idea," Draco admitted. "You have no idea how compelling that voice was. But Harry restrained me, and I did the same thing for him when the voice woke him up later."  
  
Weasley shook his head. The redness had faded, leaving him white to the lips this time, but Draco didn't find the color as appealing as he would have assumed he would.   
  
"Have you listened to yourself?" Weasley whispered. He took in Granger with his next glance, and then Harry, still hovering behind Draco and sending out small tingles of white and gold that talked about how much he would have loved to interfere. Draco ignored that. This was between him and Weasley, and Harry could feel that and must agree, or he would have pushed his way past Draco now. " _Yourselves?_ You talk as though this wild magic is more important than, oh, our  _survival_ on this planet. You act as though I must be lying if I don't feel it. And you want to do things that would probably make the rest of us die. I still don't like you, Malfoy, but you're necessary to the rest of us. And you would consider walking  _away_?"  
  
"It wasn't like that, Weasley," Draco snapped, with more soft intensity in his voice than even he would have thought himself capable of. He would have basked in the self-esteem, but Harry's hand pushed impatiently in the middle of his back, and kept him going. "It was like _this_. The magic gives us ways to defend ourselves, and ways to survive here, just like fire or water does. But it can also be dangerous when it's uncontrolled. And I defy you to think of something more uncontrolled than the storm. Except perhaps your emotions right now," he added, meeting Weasley's eyes and unleashing a deliberately cruel smile.  
  
Weasley took a step towards him, and then stopped with a clap of his hands, turning away. He was shaking his head, or just shaking in general; with someone like Weasley, Draco thought, it was often hard to tell. "You don't know what you're saying," he said over his shoulder. "I think the ones who don't have wild magic should be the ones in charge of the camp, of the defense. You clearly can't be trusted."  
  
Granger and Harry made soft sounds of pain, but to Draco's mind, Harry's went deeper and had more experience behind it, because since when did Weasley act jealous of his wife? Draco reacted without thinking, taking a step forwards and lifting his hand as Weasley turned around. Weasley was already opening his mouth, but stopped when soft dimples, and then small trickles of blood, appeared in the hollow of his throat from Draco's invisible claws.  
  
"Draco,  _don't_ \--"  
  
"Malfoy--"  
  
Granger and Harry were hurrying after him, but Draco met Weasley's eyes and spoke just a few words, ones that he thought Weasley would remember, if only because of the associated pain. "This isn't the way for you to act. Harry has already suffered enough distrust in his life, and in the world we came from, because of his magic. Don't  _you_  do it. You do it, and I'll hurt you."  
  
Weasley stared at him, his chest heaving. He didn't seem to notice the way that nudged his throat against Draco's weapons and thus made him bleed more. Or perhaps he did, and that was part of the attraction. Honestly, at this point, Draco was half-sure that Weasley _wanted_ to be hurt, to prove what a martyr he was and how wrong Draco was.  
  
Harry's hand was on his elbow. Draco still ignored him. Harry might not agree now, but this was between him and Weasley, even now.  
  
And then Weasley nodded, wincing but not otherwise acknowledging the shallow slices the action opened up, and said, "I'm sorry."  
  
Draco stepped back, snapping his hand to his side. He had little choice, with the way Harry's winds were moving in and the way Granger had surged past to put herself between him and Weasley, but he would have done it anyway. There was no other alternative to staring at Weasley in shock.  
  
"I should have thought," Weasley said, ignoring, as well, the small, murmured charms that Granger was casting on him to heal his throat. "If any of us can develop wild magic at any time, then it's no good saying only people without it should make the decisions." He took a long, careful breath. "It's--well, it's  _stupid._ I wish things were different, and I hope to hell that I never get taken by the magic, but I never thought Hermione would, either." He turned to Granger and put out his hands, gently gripping hers and stopping her from waving her wand. "What is it like for you? What's your gift going to be?"  
  
Harry's hand on his elbow became more insistent. Draco fell back under the tug, and only shook his head when Harry stared demandingly into his eyes.  _Is Weasley this weird all the time?  
  
When he has someone threatening him and telling him that they'll kill him if he takes a step wrong, maybe, _Harry snapped back.  
  
Draco rolled his eyes, but continued listening to the conversation across from them, because he was curious about Granger's gift as well. What she had said so far, about the temptation the voice had held out to her, made sense, but didn't tell Draco what she could do.  
  
Granger swallowed a little, gulped, smiled, and then turned to Draco and inclined her head. "You said that the call was coming from the northwest when you heard it?" she asked.  
  
Draco nodded, and held his peace about the "when you heard it" wording. If Granger had heard the same one, then it had to come from the same place, and if she was hearing different voices, then--well, they would deal with it when that happened. Perhaps they had multiple enemies, one to summon them by whatever magical gift they developed.  
  
"It was." Granger turned and pointed unhesitatingly away across the mountains, in the direction of the silver oval they had seen flash yesterday afternoon. "That's where we'll find what was calling us." She swallowed again. "I don't know that we  _want_ to go and find it. I think it's pretty powerful. But there it is."  
  
Draco stared at her, and saw Weasley grinning from the corner of his eye, and felt Harry pulsing green and blue pride down the bond. Then Harry said, "You've become a living map."  
  
Granger turned around with her nose gone pink. "Not about  _everything_ ," she said. "I couldn't tell you where the next mountain range is after this one, or the sea from here. But I can tell where the enemy is, and where those silver ovals are, and I could feel--I  _can_ feel someone back in camp." She blinked. "It's Ginny, I think. It has to be. But a few other little embers as well." She shot Weasley an apologetic look. "There are other people growing their wild magic back in camp already. So even if you abandoned me, you wouldn't really have anyone to lead."  
  
Weasley gathered her up, kissing her cheeks and making apologies in the most disgusting manner, but Draco was more intrigued by what Granger had said. "You're a map to the wild magic," he said flatly.  
  
Granger looked at him over her husband's shoulder and nodded. "I think so," she said. "I can even feel where the next storm will come from, I think." She pointed to the southwest. "The air feels--bluer there. Stranger than normal. I think the winds are brewing. We'll have to be careful that it doesn't catch us in the back."  
  
Draco didn't say what he wanted to say, which was that the storm that had caught them last night had probably been sent by their enemy, and that therefore Granger's gift was worth less than it might have been. He just nodded instead, and said, "That  _is_ going to be useful."  
  
For a moment, Granger's gaze and his crossed like swords, and Draco felt the closest sense of connection, of knowing what someone else was thinking, that he ever had with someone other than Harry. He shook his head uneasily and stepped back. He didn't  _want_ that connection, and he would deny it if Granger tried to exploit it.  
  
But Granger simply smiled, said, "Thank you," and turned back to Weasley to soothe him.  
  
That left Draco to Harry, but thankfully, because of the bond, the inevitable bristlings and misunderstandings took much less time than they would have to rehearse them aloud.  
  
 _You could have done it without_ hurting  _him.  
  
I didn't want him to hurt you.  
  
Ron? He never--  
  
He would have. He was talking about it. And you know that I don't mean physically. I mean mentally. I wasn't going to have that.  
  
Careful, you sound like Molly._  
  
Draco reared his head back in disgust, caught the small smile wrinkling the edges of Harry's lips, and shook his head. "You're ridiculous, Harry Potter, and I don't know why I put up with you," he whispered harshly.  
  
Harry snorted and ducked his head, wrapping his arms around Draco's neck for a minute. "I understand why it happened," he muttered. "But I'm capable of taking care of myself in situations like that, you know."  
  
Draco wrapped his arms around Harry in return, and didn't say what he was thinking, because Harry would feel it: that Harry  _could_ defend himself, but was reluctant to do so. He would allow himself to suffer agonies before making someone else feel the pin of so much as a pinprick.  
  
 _How much you have to learn about me._  
  
*  
  
Harry was glad that they had solved that minor crisis, at least, if not entirely pleased about the way they had solved it. But Ron and Draco were pleasant enough to each other over breakfast, and Ron's small wounds had healed entirely under the pressure of Hermione's wand, as Harry had assumed they would. Hermione knew exactly what she was doing when she healed injuries like that; not only had she paid close attention to Angelina, she had had practice in inflicting some wounds like that on Ron herself.  
  
But then came the moment when they had to make the decision about where to go next, and Draco turned to Hermione and stared at her.  
  
Hermione flushed red and cleared her throat. "We came north to find out what was stirring up the birds and threatening the mummidade," she said, turning to Harry as though he was still the leader. "We still need to do that."  
  
Harry nodded. "And can you sense the presence of wild magic that would do that?"  
  
Hermione stretched out her arm slowly. It was trembling, but it still formed a straight line when she extended it, and Harry wasn't surprised about where it ended up pointing.  
  
"To the northwest," she whispered. "The same direction as the thing that called us."  
  
"Do we want to go there?" Ron was slapping his wand against his knee as he spoke, glancing back and forth between the three of them with the tolerant expression Harry had seen him use when Harry and Hermione were having a leadership discussion that didn't interest him.  _Because he hasn't a trace of leadership potential in his body,_ Draco whispered and hissed inside Harry's head, but other than a quick jolt of irritation, Harry didn't react. "Could we swing around to the side and sneak up on it somehow?"  
  
"Swinging around might be a good idea," Hermione said. "But I don't know if we can sneak up on it. I don't know how aware it is of us, or why it waited until the storm began to try and call us out in it, if it has the power to destroy us at any time it likes."  
  
Harry smiled. Hermione sounded so frustrated already with the limits of her gift, even though she had barely begun to explore it. That was the Hermione he knew. He nodded, drawing her attention. "Then we'll assume the best, which is that it can't destroy us yet, or at least it's unsure," he said. "We'll swing around to the north and east, and go with a vanguard of wind. And your knowledge, Hermione." He clapped her on the back. "Ready to act as the map?"  
  
She scowled at him, the way Harry had known she would, muttered, "I'm not a  _book_ ," and then looked around as if she could spot the chair of wind that way. Harry smiled as he conjured it for her, and another one for Ron, and nudged them gently up behind his friends until they sat down, more or less of their own free will.  
  
He caught Draco's stare, and raised his eyebrows.  _What?_ No need to speak in even that much of a word through the bond, but sometimes he felt like it, especially if he had just been speaking aloud to someone else.  
  
 _Your relationship with your friends is so strange._  
  
Harry sent back an overwhelming wave of emotion, compounded of the memories of dueling the troll, hunting the Horcruxes, and going together with Ron and Hermione after the various threats and menaces to the school in their second and third and fifth years, and Draco blinked and jerked his head back. Harry nodded to him. He wouldn't say anything about Draco's friendships, because he hadn't really investigated those memories yet and had no idea how deep they had been. But he wasn't going to allow Draco to remain ignorant of what he felt for Ron and Hermione.  
  
 _We can argue and make up again,_ he said, when Draco sulked at him.  _Like you and I. Think of it like that._  
  
I don't want to think about the Weasel having sex in any way whatsoever.  
  
Harry laughed aloud, shook his head when Ron and Hermione glanced at him, and then lifted them straight up in the air, the wind singing in his blood and his head. He called Draco up with another little gesture, and laughed again at the way Draco took care to stretch out, lounging on the wind, as different as he could possibly be from the stiff, upright way Ron and Hermione were sitting in their chairs.  
  
"You are so strange, too," Draco muttered.  
  
Harry turned and swirled with joy to the northeast, accompanied by his friends and his lover.


	19. Access to the North

“Well. That’s different.”  
  
Harry only nodded in response to Draco’s words, while keeping them hovering in the air and his eyes on the mountain that loomed ahead of them. Or, well, a mountain was what Harry had to call it, because he didn’t think he’d ever run into any other word that would give a sense of what it looked like.  
  
Maybe if there had been an English word meaning “a plume of smoke that stays in the same place and shifts back and forth slowly and continuously, with rings of whiter smoke orbiting it,” than Harry could have used that. But a mountain was the closest one-word equivalent.  
  
“That’s where the wild magic that called us is coming from,” Hermione muttered, leaning forwards until Harry longed to smack her upside the head with a breeze to make her stay in her chair. “I’m sure of it.”  
  
Harry nodded in resignation. Of  _course_ the call would be coming from a place like that, the strangest and most frightening thing they had seen on Hurricane.  
  
 _I think the snake-shark was more frightening._  
  
Harry relaxed despite himself. Having someone who could hear his thoughts proved a blessing at the oddest points, and especially at those points when he would have thought it  _couldn’t._  
  
“Then we’ll have to go up to it sooner or later,” Ron said, eyeing the plume of smoke in dislike. “Doesn’t much matter whether or not we want to.” He nodded to Harry and leaned back in his chair of wind as though he assumed the plain declaration meant they would be moving forwards immediately.  
  
“I know,” Harry said, “but we’ll need to investigate what’s around it.” It looked as though the mountains blurred away into mist around the smoke. He didn’t know if that was only the effect of distance or not. Physical laws worked so differently on Hurricane that he wouldn’t trust something that looked as if it behaved in Earth ways until he had some proof that it did.  
  
“Why?” Ron cocked his head. “We can’t sneak up on it anyway, I don’t think, so we might as well attack it right away.”  
  
“We don’t know if we can sneak up on it or not,” Draco pointed out. “So we might as well behave as if we can. It’ll make us feel safer, and it’s  _possible_ that we might be able to.”  
  
Ron gave him a skewed sideways look that made Harry wonder if they were going to have more trouble, but in the end, he grunted and settled back against his chair again. “That makes as much sense as anything else on this bloody planet does,” he said. “Are we going to set up a camp?”  
  
Harry turned to Hermione. “Can you find a place that’s safe for us in terms of the wild magic? Wherever it’s strongest, we might want to avoid. Can you pinpoint where it’s weakest?”  
  
Hermione shut her eyes and turned her head in a slow, seeking motion. She had taken up doing that as they flew further and further north, and especially when they turned east, away from the source of the call. Harry didn’t know why it helped, but then, he didn’t think Hermione would understand the way the breezes blew through his hair and across his face and seemed to speak to him.  
  
“No, sorry,” Hermione said at last, opening her eyes and shaking her head. “I can sense the strongest places, but they’re like bright lights in the gloom. There might be places where the gloom is deeper, but the lights themselves make it hard to see.”  
  
Harry nodded. That was a clearer way of explaining what her gift did than he had thought she would find. “All right. Then just tell me the places where the wild magic blazes, and we’ll make sure we avoid them.”  
  
Hermione directed them around a valley that had another silver oval at the bottom of it, and a place that Harry left with regret, because it was lush and green and looked as though the bottom of the hollow were filled with forest. Of course, on Hurricane, that probably meant dense life and maybe a birds’ hunting ground. In the end, they chose a small rocky hollow with steep walls and no access that they could find through the cliffs. The only way to get out was by flying straight up, but on the other hand, that meant only airborne enemies could really get in after them.  
  
Harry felt Draco twitch as they landed. Because it could have been any number of things, he didn’t draw attention to it, but helped Ron and Hermione set up the camp’s defenses and the fire. Hermione’s gift had led them to another patch of ground where the rabbit-like creatures lived and exercised their magic, so at least they had enough food, even if it was rather bland.  
  
When Harry had watched his friends fall into one of their usual evening arguments about whether they should move the home camp, he drifted towards Draco. Draco stood with his arms folded and his gaze fixed on the distant—volcano, Harry had decided to call it. The word was as good as any other.  
  
“You’re feeling the call again, aren’t you?” Harry asked quietly.  
  
Draco whipped towards him. His face was as pale as salt, and Harry thought he had never seen his eyes so large. “I wasn’t going to answer it,” he said. “But I can hear it, and it’s telling me to come alone this time.”  
  
Harry nodded, and reached out through the bond. Draco reached back to him, his grip as strong and desperate as a wall of water.  
  
 _We’ll discover the source of the call and stop it,_ Harry reassured him.  _And I didn’t think you would answer it. But I wanted you to know that you weren’t alone.  
  
I never am.  
  
Well, this time you’re _especially  _not alone,_ Harry said, and tapped his shoulder against Draco’s.  
  
It took a while, but Draco’s smile came on, strong and real, and Harry escorted him back to the fire in far better spirits.  
  
*  
  
Draco woke in the middle of the night, turning his head at once away from the still-roaring fire to preserve his night vision. He knew what had awakened him, and it wasn’t the call resonating down the corridors of his mind.  
  
It was the enormous, night-black creature on four legs that stood at the edge of the camp, concealed in the shadows of the fire, and watched them, unmoving. Draco doubted it would have alerted him to its presence under ordinary circumstances, but it was difficult to move quietly on sheer stone, and the creature had sent a pebble skittering.  
  
Draco got his hands beneath him without difficulty. The creature was turning its head back and forth, and Draco made out the heavy horns on the sides. He wondered for a moment if it was a relative of the mummidade, and whether it would be a violation of their alliance with them to hurt it.  
  
But then one foot edged nearer, coming into the circle of the firelight and shadows where it was easier to see. Draco grinned fiercely when he saw it. It was a paw, with nails on it as heavy as iron. Not a hoof, and that made it less likely that the creature was a great goat.  
  
He woke Harry with a pulse through the bond, and told him in the same way not to move or change his breathing. Harry lay there with the wild magic gathering around him, breezes sighing in his face and ruffling Draco’s hair. Interestingly, that didn’t make the dark creature move. Draco wondered if it wasn’t as sensitive to the winds as the mummidade were, or perhaps simply not to the wild magic.  
  
 _What shall we do?  
  
Move your winds behind it, and hold it there, while I get my weapons to threaten it from the front.  
  
I’m not sure the winds will work, _Harry said.  _It walked straight through the wards and the winds that we put around the valley as if they weren’t there._  
  
Draco barely kept himself from hissing aloud. That implication of the creature’s position hadn’t occurred to him before.  _You made those barriers permeable to light and air and the rest of the things that we need during the night, though. Make this one as hard as crystal. Nothing should get through it._  
  
Harry didn’t answer in words, but Draco felt the surge of power through the bond, and knew he would be weaving.  
  
They continued to feign sleep, and the creature took another step closer. This time, Draco was watching its flanks, and saw the thick black, shimmering covering over it. He wondered for a moment if they had run into something with hands like a human’s, or at least a servant of human-like creatures. That covering could be a blanket, and perhaps the creature had a rider left behind while it came to scout on its own.  
  
Then firelight danced and sparked as the creature glanced over its shoulder, and Draco saw it from a different angle. The black swam with other colors, purple and midnight blue and sharp half-green, and he realized it was feathers, with the same blur of shades and hues as a starling’s.  
  
 _A relative of the birds?_ he asked Harry, when he could sense that Harry had paused from his intense weaving of the wind and was ready to launch his trap.  
  
 _I think it has four legs,_ Harry said briefly.  _The winds have been feeling their way around the edges of it, and it’s like—a buffalo, I think, that general shape and with the heaviness, but with paws instead of hooves and feathers draping it instead of hair._  
  
Draco blinked and gathered his own power in his hands, claws that he knew were longer and more impressive than those on the paws so near them.  _I wonder why it hasn’t attacked yet? It argues some intelligence to watch us like this, but I suppose it could only be intending to pick the easiest target.  
  
I don’t know, but I’m getting tired of lying here. And there’s the chance Ron and Hermione could wake up any second and see it and shout, which would waste a lot of preparation.  
  
Ever the Gryffindor, on the offensive._  
  
Harry didn’t respond in words, but snapped one hand out. Draco felt the stillness in the air near them as his heavily-woven wind fell over the creature from above, caging it in a mesh of magic, rattling as it hit the stony ground.  
  
The creature promptly reared on its hind legs, crying out with a voice that sounded more like clashing of sheets of metal than anything animal. It stretched up, and up, and up. Draco stared at it, his claws dangling useless at his sides for the moment, and realized that he had underestimated how  _long_ it was. Rearing above them like this, the body that had coiled on the ground and trailed back into the darkness was obvious. At  _least_ the size of a dragon, and probably bigger.  
  
He wondered for a moment if his claws were such efficient weapons after all, and whether Harry’s wind would be enough to hold it.  
  
But Harry was standing up now, his hands clenched in front of him and his teeth gritted with a determination that ricocheted down the bond to Draco, and winds were diving to aid him. That was the advantage of Harry’s gift, that he could call more help literally out of the air. Draco stood up and moved over to the side, ready to stab the creature if it turned in a way that could threaten Harry.  
  
The creature seemed intent on getting away more than anything, though—that, and tearing the invisible covering of wind over it. It wobbled back and forth, still on its hind legs, and then the great wings lifted away from its sides and chopped at Harry’s magic.  
  
Draco had never seen anything so immense, a thought that he despised as soon as he had it. Of  _course_ he’d seen bigger things in the past, and had even helped to cause some of them. It did no one  _any_ good to say that he’d never seen anything like that—  
  
And the creature was cutting furiously at the net draped over it, and might get through, from the way Harry was swearing and sweating and swaying back and forth. Draco moved to help him, stabbing at the creature’s legs.  
  
The creature screamed, an even more painful sound this time, and something else came stooping out of the sky to help it.  
  
Draco rolled on his back, lifting his hands. The claws he imagined grew longer immediately, and stabbed up into the breast of this other flying creature, which resembled the one they’d trapped.  
  
The second one shrieked, rolling over and over, its wings banging and flapping. Draco stabbed again and again, trying to cut the flight muscles, trying to create wounds deep enough that it would back away and leave them alone, trying to survive.  
  
Finally, the second creature flew away, casting a shadow over the camp that dimmed the stars and blew out their fire. The one they’d trapped threw back its head and screamed in despair, then cut at the net again.  
  
Harry’s magic fractured. Draco looked quickly around as the bond pulsed and saw him fall. Harry caught himself with his hands on the stone before he could break his nose, and rolled over, but his muscles were as limp as puddles. He was breathing noisily, too, and gulping when he tried to swallow air.  
  
Draco ran towards him at once, ignoring the way the first creature leaped for the sky. Harry’s health was more important.  
  
Harry shook his head impatiently when Draco would have rolled him back over and helped him sit up, though. “It’s just magical exhaustion,” he said. “I tried to handle too much of the wild power at once, and this is the toll it takes. Capture that thing, Draco!” He tilted his head back, and winced. Draco could only catch the edges of the pain the headache was causing him, since Harry considerately blocked most of it from the bond, but the edges were more than enough.  
  
“Not right now,” Draco said quietly. “We did our best to hold it, and lost. At least we can be sure that it won’t come back tonight.” He helped Harry sit up against a boulder and Summoned the satchels that Weasley carried. They were the ones with the richest food inside them.  
  
“How do you know that?” Harry glared at him through eyes that were bright with the coming fever. “We don’t know why it showed up and stood there watching us in the first place. It might come back for the same inexplicable reason.”  
  
Draco shook his head calmly at Harry. “It’s been frightened. If it came at the command of someone else, that person—or being—is more likely to think that we’re powerful and need to be kept away from right now. If it came at the call of its own instincts, then I think we’ve showed it that we’re not prey to be trifled with.”  
  
Harry tried to argue, but it was hard to argue against good sense, as Draco well knew. In the end, he leaned back and shut his eyes with a pathetic little murmur that sounded a good deal like, “I hope you’re right.”  
  
“I  _know_ I’m right,” Draco pointed out, his hands working lightly on the spells that would heat some of the rabbit meat and soften it. “You know the same thing most of the time, reluctant though you are to admit it.”  
  
Harry grunted.  
  
*  
  
Of course Ron and Hermione had questions, but it was a long time before Harry could answer them. Draco did everything right for a case of magical exhaustion, what happened when the power built up in a wizard’s body until it simply shut off access to magic at all, but Harry still shivered through a few hours of fever and slept late into the morning.  
  
Draco fussed over him when Harry forced himself back to his feet, but Harry shook his head at him. “As long as I can’t handle the wild magic, then the rest of you are unfairly exposed,” he said.  
  
“ _Unfairly_ ,” Draco told the horizon. “Yes, he wears himself out in our defense, and then insists that it’s unfair to rest.”  
  
“You need me,” Harry said, and held out his hands. For a moment, he was afraid that Draco was right, he really had exhausted himself too much, and the magic wouldn’t respond. Then the winds sprang up and curled around him like purring cats, and Harry gratefully increased the camp’s defenses back to where they needed to be again.  
  
He turned around to find Draco glaring at him. But when Harry stayed on his feet instead of collapsing at once, Draco shook his head and let him be.  
  
Hermione was gazing off to the north with wide, blurred eyes. “I can sense that the magic around the smoking mountain has grown,” she whispered. “I wonder if that was what sent those creatures after us?”  
  
“Maybe,” Harry said. “But the problem is, the one just stood looking at us for a long time, like it was curious. That doesn’t sound to me like Bodiless sent it. It would have attacked us at once if it was like the storm.”  
  
“How did it get through the wards?” Ron demanded, glaring at his wand as though it had betrayed him.  
  
Harry shook his head. “I don’t know. I do know that it was strong—I’ve never felt something that strong since we got here. The birds are more dangerous, maybe, but it was fighting me even as I held it in the net of wind. I think the wild magic of Hurricane must have combated our Earth magic.”  
  
“ _Our_ Earth magic,” Draco muttered, glaring at Harry as if to remind him that he hadn’t used his wand in a long time.  
  
Harry shrugged back at him. At least things had progressed a bit if Draco was willing to consider himself part of a group with Ron and Hermione, instead of his own separate little group with Harry.  
  
Draco caught the edge of the thought and walked away to inspect the slashes that the creature’s claws had left in the stone.  
  
“There’s so much we don’t understand,” Hermione muttered, turning to Harry and frowning as though that was somehow his fault. “No matter how much we learn about it, even with my new gift, we don’t really know what we’re up against.”  
  
Harry raised his hands. “I know. And I’m getting sick of our lack of knowledge, and there’s no mummidade around here for us to ask.” He took a deep breath. “I’m wondering if we shouldn’t simply attack the smoking mountain today, or at least fly directly towards it and see what happens.”  
  
“That’s because you’re mad,” Draco called back helpfully from the edge of the camp.  
  
“We don’t dare right now, I think,” Hermione said, frowning at him. “You’re exhausted, and we’ll probably all need to be at our top strength to survive this.”  
  
 _And that’s a reason you should pay attention to, since it’s one of your precious friends saying it,_ Draco snarled down the bond. Harry pushed back attention and affection at him, and shrugged at Ron, who looked as though he would like to be in the air and flying at the mountain along with Harry; at least it would be  _doing_ something.  
  
“What else do you suggest we do?” Harry asked Hermione quietly. “We can’t simply remain here, and we don’t know what’s going to be in the north. You can feel sources of wild magic, but you can’t tell us what they are.”  
  
“I know,” Hermione snapped. “Believe me, I spent most of yesterday trying to make this magic tell me what was up there beyond these mountains.” Her hand toyed with her robe for a minute, and then she took a deep breath. “Let’s fly straight north. The mountain is where our enemy is, but maybe we can find out where those creatures came from if we go towards the other source of magic I can sense.”  
  
“Other source?” She hadn’t said anything about that before.  
  
“Something strong and pulsing,” Hermione said. “But not calling. It seems content to sit there and glow to itself, the way a sun would.”  
  
It wasn’t a comforting description, but the only thing that would have made Harry feel better right now was following the course he had laid out, and Hermione was right about the reasons it wasn’t a good idea. He nodded shortly, and they made ready to leave, this time to travel across the mountains they could see looming directly to the north.  
  
*  
  
Draco knew that none of them had felt the mountains were exactly natural, but they had flown among them for long enough now that they had at least adapted to the sight of them. None of them were prepared for the way the mountains fell away in front of them after a few hours’ travel to the north, or for the country that lay beyond.  
  
It was another great grassy plain, but this time more like a vast meadow than the rolling ground they had made their home camp on. The grass was green. The ground was flat, and dotted with wildflowers. Draco found them not as beautiful as the silver flowers tossing their heads in the wind that he and Harry had seen when they flew to the ocean, but one could not have everything. These flowers were white and red and yellow, and probably more homely to people like Granger and Weasley, who almost fell out of their chairs with staring.  
  
“Look!” Weasley’s voice cracked down the middle at the same time as Granger gasped aloud.  
  
Draco followed their pointing fingers, little as he wanted to, and saw shapes skimming above the grass. They were white, like the mummidade, but far lighter and more graceful, with longer legs. More like deer, or antelopes. They trailed back and forth in a long chain, which reversed and bent back on itself, like a dance.  
  
The air above them vibrated, and a long scream came down. Draco looked upwards and saw two more of the creatures like the ones he and Harry had fought circling on wide wings. The white creatures on the ground scattered at the sight of them, leaping straight up into the sky and unfolding wings of their own. In seconds, they scattered into what seemed like a thousand different directions.  
  
“Like a flock of birds,” Harry muttered. “Another survival strategy.”  
  
Another scream sounded as if in response to his words, and Draco felt the air near them shake. Three of the black-feathered creatures dropped towards them, their wings chopping wildly at the air and their paws outstretched.  
  
And on their backs were riders.


	20. New Inhabitants

The riders were not human.  
  
Draco was sure of that in the first moments he watched them drop, but he was surprised by how much they  _looked_ like humans. They sat upright, or only slightly slumped forwards, and the hands that rested on the necks of their mounts had no claws or other disqualifications for human. It looked as though they had normal shoulders, and two legs only. Of course, it was difficult to tell much more than that when they were muffled up to the shoulders in what looked like cloaks of the same feathers that wrapped their mounts.  
  
"Who are you?" Harry asked, his voice low and level, but carried to everyone in earshot with the help of his winds.  
  
 _Because that will work_. Draco said back to him in a voice that he let flood with all the blue and purple emotions of his disapproval.   
  
 _We have to start somewhere, and the tone might show them that we're not a threat.  
_  
Draco had no idea why it should show them that when they probably didn't speak English or anything like it, but he had to admit that he didn't really have a better idea. He hovered and waited for some sort of response from the riders.  
  
It was not long in coming.  
  
The nearest rider dropped beneath them, the creature it rode hovering in a way that should have been impossible for so large a beast. Then again, who really knew what was possible and what impossible by the laws of Hurricane?   
  
The other two riders began to weave rings around them, their beasts uttering those cries like clashing metal on the way. The air filled with noise that made Granger--whom Draco would have thought more accustomed to battle after the way she had hunted at Harry's side--clasp her hands over her ears and Weasley shout something loud and furious that faded into the general melee.  
  
 _Distraction_ , Draco snapped in Harry's direction.  
  
 _I know it_ , Harry responded, bright and low, and Draco saw that his hands were already furiously weaving back and forth.  _They don't care about what we said to them. Let's see whether they care about this._  
  
The next moment, wind flew and banged away from Harry, the fiercest wind Draco had ever felt him summon. Shrieks erupted from thin air, louder than the ones that had broken from the throats of the creatures, and the beasts' wings became useless as Harry flung them backwards.  
  
The riders made harsh movements with their forelimbs, the wraps of feathers blowing back so that Draco could make out their features at last. Their heads pointed forwards, their eyes brilliant above what looked like beaks, and their skin glinted softly, covered with what looked like pinfeathers. The fingers Draco had thought they held on the slender reins controlling the beasts were actually long claws, flexing back and forth as they fought to hold their positions in the air.  
  
 _Not human!_ Draco cried to Harry across the gulfs of air that separated them.   
  
 _And that surprises you?  
_  
Before Draco could reply to that in the way it deserved, the creatures were hurtling back towards them, their wings beating relentlessly, their mouths wide open and their heads stooping down as if to scoop up the individual humans in their mouths. Draco felt the winds snap to around them, as Harry reacted to the immediate threat by hauling them out of the way.  
  
 _It's war, then_ , Harry said, with a satisfaction in his voice that Draco didn't understand, and the wind snapped out back, forth, right, left, up, down, more directions than Draco had known Harry could command, or more than he thought he should be commanding when he was still so close to magical exhaustion. Draco felt the winds around him tighten into what seemed to be a flexible mesh cradle, a protective version of what Harry had wrapped around the beast when they tried to capture it last night, and then he swung madly across the sky.  
  
 _What the fuck are you doing?  
  
Battle.  
_  
The answer flooded the bond with colors of crystal and gold that Draco had never seen before, exultant and deep as a sunrise, and he thought he might understand why their predicament thrilled Harry. He understood war, he understood fighting, and he was never happier than when he had an enemy he could attack directly, instead of having to cope with it as he would the politics of the camp.  
  
All of which made him mad, of course, and this something they would have to talk about sooner rather than later.  
  
But Draco had little chance to agonize over that as he found himself hovering a long way above Harry, still wrapped in that protective cocoon, and battle was joined.  
  
*  
  
The beasts came at him from before and behind, and one from directly below, a tactic that Harry hadn't often had to face before this. They had open mouths and wide claws and wings that rivaled the sky in expanse, and Harry knew he should be afraid, that fear would be the sensible and expected response.  
  
But he was full of too much joy to be afraid.  
  
The beasts came for him, trying to close in a triangle that would trap him between them, but Harry was already gone. Down and at a diagonal he flew, his hands held close at his sides to avoid even the barest breath of an encounter with the wild claws, and his will alone commanding the winds that exploded around him like a maze of strings.  
  
He might not have the shredding power of Draco's gift, but that didn't matter, not here and not now. Not when he could wield winds like nets and hawsers, tangling around the wings of the beasts, snaring their claws as they struggled, binding their mouths as they shrieked.  
  
He reached the end of his dive and turned around, to see the three beasts upside-down, their riders clinging to them desperately like people on charmed brooms. Snared by nothing, they must think. Or could those native to Hurricane sense the wind and its magic even though they could not see them?  
  
Harry laughed, floating there, his friends safe above and watching the battle, his muscles aching in the best possible way, his enemies at his mercy.  
  
Then he made them fall.  
  
He heard a multitude of shrieks as they did, and knew not all of them had come from inhuman throats. He looked up at Ron and Hermione and waved reassuringly moments before he pulled the beasts out of their falls, spinning them like yo-yos.  
  
The riders began to dangle from their saddles, or whatever it was that their beasts wore; Harry found it hard to see. He didn’t care about seeing. The sensations stabbed through him like lightning, the freedom and the ease and the sheer insane  _power_ of it, and he laughed as he spun the beasts back upright and strengthened the wind around them, while making sure he had enough gusts at his beck and call to keep from falling.  
  
Then he called to them with a gesture they might understand, forming winds into a dense spiral and catching up some grass from the meadows so they could see it. He placed that to one side. On the other side, he outlined a gentle, cradling wind with grass, and then waited to see which one they would choose.  
  
It didn’t take the riders much time to make up their minds; one could say that for them, at least. They turned as one to point their beaks and claws at the gentler wind. Harry nodded, and broke the meshes that held them up, stooping them into the wind that would carry them straight to the ground. The riders went without one menacing glare back at Harry or the others. Maybe they  _could_ learn.  
  
Harry slanted towards the ground when he was done, laughing and laughing and laughing. His throat hurt. He touched it once, and then dropped his hand and looked up at his friends.  _Are you all right?_ he asked Draco. He hadn’t been aware of the bond while he was battling, he thought. It was probably the longest time he had ever gone without touching Draco’s mind since they had first bonded, or at least since he’d stopped resisting the bond.  
  
 _I’ll be better when we’re on the ground and away from these enemies,_ Draco said. He sounded as though he was holding his voice, or his thoughts, which meant the same thing in the bond, level with extreme effort.  
  
 _Sorry,_ Harry said, only now thinking about what this might have appeared like from the outside. But he wouldn’t have gone back and done something less dangerous if he could. This had been what he  _needed_ , and what he had wanted the moment he realized how intent the riders were on attacking.  
  
Draco said nothing, but Harry thought he could feel his gaze across all those meters of air. He straightened his own shoulders and tried to convince himself that it would be all right. His friends were likely to understand, and they had seen him use even greater displays of power when they were still in the wizarding world, and been all right with it.  
  
 _Are you sure of that?_  
  
The voice in his head was sly, insinuating, and had nothing to do with either Draco or the call he had heard before. It was purely the voice of his conscience, or his guilt, in the deepest part of himself, always convinced that he didn’t deserve anything he’d been given.  
  
 _I’m sure,_ Harry told it flatly, and reminded himself that only madmen talked to themselves, and dismissed it from his mind.  
  
*  
  
Draco was grateful that Harry had chosen to have them land on a piece of the meadow near the mountains they’d flown over, at least out of sight from the beasts and riders who had landed somewhere else. He didn’t want the provocation to attack that looking at them would probably be right now.  
  
And it wasn’t even the riders and beasts he was worried about being tempted to attack, so much as Harry.  
  
He looked Harry calmly in the eye as they fell and then dropped softly into the grass. Harry frowned at him and shook his head a little as though he didn’t understand what Draco was doing, or thinking. But then the chairs landed and released Weasley and Granger, and Draco discovered his real allies.  
  
“Don’t you  _ever, ever_ do something like that again, Harry James Potter!”  
  
Harry turned to Granger, gaping. Draco made a mental note that Harry’s full name worked well, at least in that particular tone, to take Harry off-guard and convince him to listen to what followed.  
  
Granger stepped up to Harry and stared into his eyes, not backing away even when Harry frowned at her. She wasn’t afraid of his magic, Draco thought. Good. That would have been a complication they didn’t need, renewed fear and distrust of Harry, when they had to make Harry listen to them if they were going to stand a chance of convincing him not to do that again.  
  
“What?” Harry asked, as though he didn’t know perfectly well what.  
  
Granger shook her head, lips pursed. “You were mad,” she said. “Especially to be handling that much magic so close to having collapsed of magical exhaustion. What did you  _think_ would happen? What would have happened if you’d dropped them, or  _us,_ in the middle of flinging that wind around?”  
  
“That wasn’t going to happen,” Harry said instantly, his nostrils flaring with a stubbornness that Draco knew almost better from that look than from the corresponding white flare in the bond. “The wind would have told me it was going to break out of my control. That was what happened last night. I had enough warning to catch myself as it fell, because it told me it was going.”  
  
“But you’re still recovering from a case of magical exhaustion,” Draco said, because he could be just as annoying as Harry could. He caught Harry’s eye and smiled grimly at the expression of outrage there.  _Yes, do be outraged. It won’t help,_ he sent along the bond. “This time, you might not have had that warning, or not in time to do anything about it. You know as well as I do that playing with this level of power is dangerous, and not something you have much experience with from Earth. It could have ended badly.”  
  
“It didn’t.”  
  
Harry turned away from Draco, and the image of a stone wall came down the bond. Draco didn’t mind that. He sent creeping tendrils of amusement and anger back, and they seized and broke down the stone. Harry snarled at him over his shoulder.  
  
“You know you’re in the wrong, and you hate admitting that,” Granger said. She had spent some moments studying Harry, and now nodded as though  _she_ was the one bonded with him, and the one who could get him to admit his mistake. Draco controlled his jealousy. If she made Harry listen, that would be close to enough for him. “You regret it already.”  
  
“I did what I had to do,” Harry said, a stiff little speech, while the bond between him and Draco twisted like a wire in the wind. “What else were we going to do?”  
  
“Work harder on approaching them peacefully,” Granger said. “Because they didn’t understand English was no reason to attack them.”  
  
“Yes, they looked so marvelously peaceful themselves,” Draco drawled, because while he didn’t agree with what Harry had done,  _someone_ had to represent the voice of common sense in this situation.  
  
Granger turned and glared at him. “We don’t know what might have happened if we had held back and not responded to their attacks. Or if Harry had held them at a distance and done so until they realized we were stronger. This is our world now, but theirs, too. We have to live with them. How can we do that if we’re attacking them?”  
  
Harry winced, and Draco felt the throb down the bond as that statement went home.  _Why do you listen to her so much more easily than you do to me?_ he asked Harry.  
  
 _Because I’ve always listened to her._  
  
Draco reckoned that was true, what with the adventures that Harry and Weasley and Granger had had together, but it didn’t make him any less irritated with Harry. He leaned back on air and shook his head. “Granger’s right,” he said aloud. “You have enough power to forbid them from attacking us and hold them at bay. But that thought never entered your head, did it?”  _I heard what you said when I asked you what you were doing,_ he added, as Harry turned on him.  _You sounded so joyful to be fighting. I would have thought you would be tired of war after the part you played in it._  
  
Harry squeezed his eyes shut and lifted his hands to cup them around the sides of his skull. Draco watched without much pity. He knew what Harry had endured, or a lot of it, thanks to the development of the bond, but this situation had been of his own making.  
  
“We need to concentrate on other things than just keeping peace with the riders, whoever they are,” Harry said harshly out of the cocoon of his hands. “We need to think about the power that called us, and how we’re going to get there if we can’t make a detour to the north.”  
  
“We need to think about this more,” Draco said peacefully. He noted that Weasley and Granger had stepped back and seemed prepared to let him handle it.  _Well, perhaps even the Terrible Twosome can come to some sense at last.  
  
Don’t talk about my friends that way!_  
  
Draco sent back enough harshness that Harry staggered as though caught by one of his own winds.  _What you did is the point of this conversation, and not what I call them. They don’t care what I call them. They can’t hear it.  
  
I can._  
  
Draco reined himself in, hard. His temper was rising to meet Harry’s, and it would do no one but their enemies any good if they argued. Perhaps the power that called them had even been waiting for this.   
  
 _Harry,_ he said, when some moments had passed by and he and Harry had watched each other and the bond had boiled with emotions and both Weasley and Granger remained passively back, still.  _You know as well as I do that this isn’t the way to handle it. What are we really arguing about?_  
  
He would have heard Harry swallow even if they hadn’t been bonded, he was sure.  _How reckless I was with my wind magic when I still haven’t recovered very well from attacking the creature that watched us._  
  
Draco nodded.  _Right. That means you can defend yourself on those grounds, but you shouldn’t try to distract me with small, petty statements that matter less._  
  
Harry huffed out a breath. Then he said,  _Fine. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have used that much magic, and I should have given the riders more of a chance to explain themselves. Is that what you wanted to hear?  
  
What I want to hear is less important than knowing that you won’t do it again, _Draco said, and produced the emotion that Harry didn’t seem to have taken note of from behind his back like a card in a game.  _You frightened me, Harry._  
  
Harry winced.  _I’m sorry. I should have known how it would feel to be snatched up like that and hung in the air. I was sure that I wouldn’t let you fall, but you don’t have the same control over the winds that I do.  
  
I wasn’t scared of that. I was scared _for  _you._  
  
Harry blinked at him, and that was another thing that  _exasperated_ Draco about him, that he would never think of that, even when their minds were linked and thinking of that should have been as simple as listening to what Draco was thinking and picking up his emotions from there.  
  
 _Yes, I was scared for you,_ Draco told him.  _You don’t have to agree, you can think that you were perfectly in control, and maybe I should have picked that up from the bond and stopped being so frightened. But I thought you had gone mad. It felt like that. That’s the main reason I want to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again—although Granger is also right that sooner or later we’re going to have to live on the planet with these people._  
  
Harry said nothing. Then a small, shimmering tendril of emotion crept down the bond, and Draco realized he was smiling.  _Thank you. For that.  
  
For what? _And then there were the times that Draco thought being bonded didn’t actually help them to understand each other that much.  
  
 _Reminding me that someone worries about me. That it’s not always about the damage I could cause or the way I attacked other people, although those things are important, too. That sometimes, it’s about worrying about me. I know people care about me, but it’s always nice to hear._  
  
Draco decided that next time he hesitated between being honest and lying, being honest would win. Harry would melt and purr all over him if he did that.  
  
 _Not all the time,_ Harry said, his voice like sand.  _But I think it’s time that we went back to talking in a way that Ron and Hermione can hear, don’t you?_  
  
 _You still haven’t said whether or not you would do that again._  
  
I won’t do it again. And the quiet steadiness behind the promise echoed down the bond and meant more to Draco than many other things Harry could have said.  
  
*  
  
“We should decide what we’re going to do about approaching the riders and seeking peace with them.”  
  
Harry sat back quietly while the others debated what to do. He felt he had nothing to contribute to this conversation right now. He might already have caused irreparable damage—although at least he hadn’t killed anyone, and he had safely put the riders and their beasts down on the ground. That might go far as a peace offering, should they ever manage to actually communicate. He had apologized, and that was as much as he could do for right now.  
  
He turned his head to the north, across the green meadow, and watched the white winged creatures that looked like antelope grazing again. He wondered if they were intelligent, and if there was a way to communicate with them if they were. He thought about how nice it would be to have the camp here, to live in a place that looked more like Earth, at least as far as the grass went, and without as many dangers. The birds would probably never come here, and the wind wasn’t as wild thanks to the mountains.  
  
But there was the power that had called them from the volcano, and there were the riders and their beasts.  
  
As Hermione argued that they should speak to the most human-like people they had found on Hurricane first, Draco argued for going back to the volcano and trying to sneak up on the power that had called them again, and Ron favored a direct attack, a shadow fell over them. Harry looked up at once, and saw a beast hovering there, its paws tucked into its breast, the shaggy coating of feathers swaying around it.  
  
A rider sat on its back.  
  
Harry gathered up his winds, not expanding them yet, not doing anything threatening, but weaving them into a quiet, tight cocoon around the four of them. If the rider attempted to swoop down, drop a weapon, use wind magic, or anything else, then it would learn how well-prepared they were to defend themselves.  
  
But the rider only swept back and forth as though uncertain who they were—or counting them. By now, the others had noticed them and had fallen silent, staring up. Harry knew, because of the bond, that Draco’s claws were extending.  
  
The beast abruptly kicked its back legs against the air and beat its wings, ascending sharply. It wheeled into the sky and was gone. But the rider leaned over the side of it before that, and something small plummeted towards them from its hand.  
  
Harry snapped up a giant hand to catch the thing, only to find that Draco was there first, cupping it in a nest of invisible claws. Harry leaned back as it came down, and then leaned in curiously.  
  
It looked like a stripped piece of meat, about the size of a deer haunch. Harry had no doubt—after the first moments when he doubted the nature of it altogether, at least—that it came from one of the antelope on the meadow.  
  
Draco stared at it, then at Harry. “A peace offering?” he asked.  
  
“We can hope,” Hermione said, and Harry knew he hadn’t ruined everything after all when he saw the way she smiled.


	21. Making Peace

This time, when he opened his eyes to see one of the giant creatures crouching beside the campfire and regarding them, Draco didn’t immediately wake Harry or reach for his magic. He looked carefully, and now he thought he could see the rider standing beside the creature, although so small that it was dwarfed by one of the paws. Its claws rested on the creature’s side, and its beak and bird-face showed plainly.  
  
They had continued flying north across the plain yesterday, with the intention of turning northwest as soon as they could to come up on the volcano. They had seen no more beasts or riders, although Draco was inclined to treat the haunch of antelope the rider above them had dropped as a peace offering, the same as Harry was.  
  
But there was a large difference between a solitary peace offering, and this, particularly when they weren’t sure that the rider who had dropped the haunch was the same one watching them now.  
  
Draco sat up. The rider pressed closer to the beast, but didn’t take off. The beast opened its mouth, but didn’t snarl or screech.  
  
Harry woke up when Draco touched his mind, of course, and when  _he_ sat up, the rider did move. It spread its claws and crouched down, head tilted at an awkward angle. Draco stared. He supposed it might be a submissive gesture, but he knew little about the submissive gestures that birds, as opposed to mammals, used with each other.  
  
 _Do we approach it?_ Harry asked him.  
  
Draco couldn’t stifle the burst of pleasure that came from Harry asking him instead of just acting on his own, and from his wry grimace in Draco’s direction, Harry knew it, but he still didn’t move. Draco inclined his head.  _A little, I think. We can take the rabbit meat that’s left from last night with us._  
  
Harry nodded once, and they both rose to their feet. The rider crouched down further, but kept on studying them, staring. Draco found it hard to read those hard black eyes, rimmed with gold, but he reckoned they might as great a curiosity to the creature as it was to them. If they had curiosity, if they  _were_ sentient, and bringing the haunch suggested they were.  
  
Draco was the one to hold up the rabbit meat, because any threatening gesture from Harry right now would probably cause panic. He waited until the rider and the beast were both staring, and then tossed it in their direction.  
  
The beast snapped out its neck and scooped the food out of midair, swallowing without appearing to chew. The rider watched it, then laid its hand on the neck of its beast and rose up. Squinting, Draco thought he could make out straps lashed around the beast’s chest and neck, leading up to a saddle in the natural hollow between the wings, where the rider climbed up and stared down on them in silence.  
  
Draco didn’t like being forced to look up, but he had Harry at his side, and the rider had either been part of the group Harry had battled yesterday or been told about them. He looked back mildly, and thought for a moment that the rider bobbed its beak at them, as if satisfied of something.  
  
Then the beast spread its wings, and Draco hastily stepped back out of range. The winds that Harry had strung around the camp raced over to him and supported him against the downdraft. The rider watched them both as the beast rose and rose, apparently without much tugging on the reins, and turned north.  
  
They watched together as it sped north, faster than its own flickering shadow on the grass. Then Harry sighed. “I didn’t fuck up everything after all,” he said.  
  
“No,” Draco said. “But I wish that we had some way to communicate with them besides food gifts. They’ve already given us one, we’ve given them one. I don’t know what else there is left to do or say with them.”  
  
“We’ll come up with a way.”  
  
 _Good to hear you saying “we,”_ Draco told him, as they turned to wake Harry’s friends and face the day.  
  
 _It’s the only thing I can say,_ Harry said, and caught Draco’s hand, and squeezed it, filling Draco with enough harsh joy that he thought he might scream like the riders’ beasts. He contented himself with a slow, regal nod, and a squeeze back.  
  
*  
  
The grass grew greener and greener the further north they went, but Harry still saw nothing of any cities.  
  
Well, perhaps the riders didn’t need them, as Draco pointed out when Harry touched his mind through the bond. They had the ability to hunt on their beasts, and they might live in the mountains as easily as on the plains. Perhaps the plains were only their way of getting food, and they stayed in the mountains the rest of the time.  
  
Harry would have liked to believe that, as it would have made it easier to move the camp here, but he didn’t think the riders would have defended their territory so fiercely otherwise. It was a puzzle, and it didn’t get any easier as they reached the point where they would have to turn to reach the volcano.  
  
 _Harry._  
  
Draco’s voice was queer, and quivered through the bond. Harry glanced at him. His face was pale, but a quick scan of the grass and the mountains didn’t reveal to Harry what was troubling him.  _What?_ he demanded.  
  
 _I can hear the call again._  
  
Harry promptly turned his head in the direction where he knew the smoke-shrouded mountain lay, but no matter how hard he listened, there was nothing there, no plucking at his thoughts or his wild magic. Perhaps the enemy had decided to focus on Draco because he was the one who had been making the plans lately, or because his wild magic was weaker.  
  
 _Oh, thank you so very much,_ Draco snarled in his head, sounding much more like himself.  _Just because I didn’t swing anyone around and almost crash them into the ground yesterday doesn’t mean that I can’t wreak damage. Or who destroyed that bird and the snake-shark? You helped me, but I shredded them._  
  
Harry nodded.  _But does Bodiless—assuming this is Bodiless—know that? I don’t know if it can access our memories, or only create a call that somehow reaches out and taps into our deepest desires._  
  
Draco opened his mouth to respond, and suddenly stopped. He was hanging in midair, despite the winds that tried to tug him forwards, and his mouth was slowly opening. He looked like someone taking in a giant spoon full of some food he hated.  
  
Harry spun towards him—and Draco shot away from the rest of the group in the direction of the smoky mountain, as though catapulted.  
  
 _Draco!_  
  
The rage that broke through Harry made the battle-madness that he’d suffered when he was trying to stop the riders and their beasts yesterday look like nothing. He broke away after Draco with a speed that surprised even him, the winds sweeping him up an along as though he had wings.  
  
As fast as he flew, the force that had snatched Draco was faster. Draco was fading in front of him, and Harry could feel the bond growing fainter as well, as though the threads of wild magic that had made it in the first place were unraveling one by one. Perhaps Bodiless was taking Draco’s power from him.  
  
Harry took a deep breath, and held it, and hammered it through himself, changing his thoughts into convictions. No, he was  _not_ going to believe something like that. Draco’s magic was his, and no one could take it from him.  
  
But they had never precisely understood how the bond between them had come into being, and perhaps it was possible to attack and unravel  _that_ , or block it in the same way that Bodiless had blocked them from feeling the calls it sent out to each of them.  
  
Harry plunged into the middle of the bond and held firm there, sending his magic—not his wild magic, the other power in his body, coupled with the will that had driven him to walk into the Forbidden Forest—surging along it. He  _believed_ in the bond, he wanted it, he willed it, and he would spend himself recklessly to maintain it. It was  _not_ going to be something that the idiotic Bodiless succeeded in taking away from him.  
  
Because it wasn’t.  
  
“Harry!”  
  
The calls came from behind him, and Harry imagined how alarming it must be for Ron and Hermione to see him diving away from them like that, while they remained helpless in their chairs of wind. He sent a command to some of the winds around him to go back and escort his friends safely to the ground. If he was lost in going after Draco, then at least they would be safe, in a way, and they might be able to get back to the camp if the riders would take him.  
  
Right now, Harry had to worry about what was in front of him, not an event far away in the future.  
  
He dived after Draco.  
  
*  
  
Draco could feel the wind whispering to him, but it seemed to him as though he was drugged and listening, and the whispering happened somewhere outside his head. Not  _inside_ it, anyway. Inside his head, he was alert and restless and waiting for something else to happen, perhaps for Harry to come and get him.  
  
But outside, he could hear the wind telling him tales of power, promising him that it could reach out and give him the same magic he had admired in Harry, no, the magic he had  _envied_ in Harry, that it could make him the strongest wizard in the camp, that he could overrule others with a glance if he wanted to. He could toss Harry around the way Harry had tossed him around yesterday. He could be the strongest, the one who carried out his wishes, the way he had dreamed.  
  
Did he want to perform the ritual that the mummid by the sea had done to call a child into existence? Then he should be able to do it. He would have to have Harry help him, but he could command Harry with the magic he would have now. Harry’s odd ideas about Teddy being jealous or not wanting a sibling would mean nothing.  
  
Did he want his properties on Earth back? He would be able to reach through the gate and tear the wizarding world apart. He would be able to do anything he wanted, be anything he wanted, making someone do anything he wanted.  
  
Draco bowed his head and panted. Sometimes he felt as though he was thinking those thoughts, and then again as though someone else was thinking them through him. He wondered if this was a sign that he was in Bodiless’s power. But the mummid hadn’t described anything like this, only the birds coming down on them out of season.  
  
 _They never came far enough north to hear me. They never came far enough north to appreciate me._  
  
Draco lifted his streaming eyes, and found himself near the smoking mountain. This close, though, he could see what the smoke concealed. He could look down into a hollow valley with its mountain missing, the way they had seen as they came north, and found Bodiless looking back at him.  
  
It was pure, raw magic, pure, raw power. It drove past Draco’s eyes and into his brain, and what was important was his impression of it, not what he saw. He knew that this was the call, and it knew him and cradled him and observed his desires. It spoke in his head, where the bond with Harry had been, and whispered and shouted at once.  
  
 _Power. That is all that matters, the magic, becoming the magic, being the magic._  
  
Draco’s hands reached out to it. He knew it couldn’t literally be so, but the voice that sang to him was the voice of the deepest truth he had known all his life, the truth he had known on Earth, the truth he had known and wanted to shout at Harry for ignoring, when Harry could do anything he wanted with his magic.  
  
Harry could have stayed in the wizarding world and changed  _everything_. Someone with that much wild magic would have no equal. He could have forced the Ministry to stop persecuting the Weasleys and him. He could have protected Teddy. He could have come to Draco and taken what he wanted.  
  
 _He had no reason to want it, then._  
  
The voice was faint and far away, though, and the truth was bugling in Draco’s head. The Ministry’s divisions were wrong, stupid, the division into “normal” magic and Dark Arts. What mattered was what you did, not your intentions with it. And you could harm someone with a Light spell and save them with a Dark spell.  
  
Power was what mattered.  
  
A soft sound rolled around him, a sound like an earthquake laughing. Draco still reached out, and the heart of that power beat in front of him, the greatest power on Hurricane, the power that would always outrank all the others. On Earth, Harry could have been a god. On Hurricane, he could be nothing but a god’s favored servant.  
  
As Draco would be, if he took the power that Bodiless chose to offer him.  
  
Draco drew his head back, and with it his breath, and with it his hands, and with them his will. He hovered there, held by magic, cradled by desire, and he knew that Bodiless watched him from below, without body and without eyes.  
  
He didn’t  _want_ to be someone else’s servant. That subservient position was not what he wanted the ultimate magic for.  
  
The magic around him purred and roared forth. This was the heart of Hurricane, the source of all its winds, all the power carried on them. The power around him that understood no second best, that did not want a subservient position, either, and would take away anyone who tried to make that claim.  
  
 _Take away. The way it called me here, and tried to call Granger and Harry. Maybe the way it called the creatures that lived in the ruins beside the silver ovals, whatever or whoever they were._  
  
Draco shook his head. He would never yield to something like this. The dreams of unimaginable strength it gave him were the things it wanted, and it disproved its own ability to grant wishes even as it offered them, because it couldn’t grant his ultimate one. He turned his head away from Bodiless and sniffed his disapproval.  
  
The sound around him went silent. Then the call redoubled, spinning through his body in great ripples, overlapping with another call that echoed from the back of his mind, the dreams that Bodiless had said he could have, the images of magic and what he could do with it, the bond that—  
  
The bond that connected him to Harry. Draco had almost forgotten it in the pressure of decisions and wishes that congealed around him, but the bond was there, and now Draco could feel it, changing, growing.  
  
That meant Harry was coming closer. Draco couldn’t prevent the thought from darting across his mind, and damned himself for it. What he knew, Bodiless would know. If he wanted Harry’s attack to be a surprise, he should have kept himself from thinking about it.  
  
But a few seconds later, he knew that was impossible. Winds buffeted the cradle of air that held him, and made it sway back and forth, so that for a few sickening moments Draco was back in the fight yesterday where Harry had bound him up in the sky while he fought the riders. And more winds came and coiled around him, and yanked against the hold Bodiless had on him, although Draco knew it was impossible for him to free him, because Bodiless was so much stronger.  
  
Harry was coming.   
  
 _Of course he is. He’ll attack in a doomed last charge, the way he’s good at, and think that he’s doing something grand and noble, because that’s also the way Gryffindors_ think,  _and he never stopped being a Gryffindor in his heart, where it counts._  
  
Tears starting to life in his eyes from despair and the pressure of the winds, Draco felt himself turn to face Harry’s approach. It was Bodiless who turned him, or perhaps the winds coming from Harry, or the purchase that Bodiless allowed them to have on Draco. Because it was Bodiless that was allowing this, all of it. It could have held Harry away with a wall of wind, and forced him to watch as it destroyed Draco.  
  
The call had ceased. Draco could do nothing but hang there, and watch as Harry hurled himself at a foe too strong for him to destroy, a foe who could turn his winds against him—although when Draco tried to call that down the bond to Harry, he found his words blocked by an enormous wall.  
  
 _Of course I do. Of course Bodiless would never allow anything to happen that could actually give Harry a chance at survival._  
  
 _We should have stayed on Earth._  
  
*  
  
Harry found it hard to see what was ahead of him. Churning purple and grey smoke, yes, like the plume that had outlined the mountains ahead of him for so long. And a shifting haze that he realized, when the hairs on his arms and the nape of his neck began to rise, must be made of pure magical power.  
  
But he could see Draco, hanging in the middle of all that and blazing like a beacon. He knew it was a taunt, a challenge, that Draco was the prey and meant to summon him. But he couldn’t slow down for all that. So what? He had faced enemies before, overwhelming odds that no one thought he could beat, and he had won.  
  
 _This isn’t Voldemort,_ said a voice in the back of his mind that sounded like Draco’s, although Harry had heard nothing from Draco down the bond since Bodiless had snatched him away.  _It’s something much stronger, and greater, and older._  
  
Harry knew that, but he threw the knowledge away. That might be true, but it didn’t lessen his need to rescue Draco, to have him back at his side. As long as Bodiless held Draco, Harry would come for him.  
  
Bodiless waited until Harry was above one of the mountains that looked most real, a hillock of grey and white stone. And then it unleashed a hammer of wind that slammed into Harry and sent him reeling over and over again.  
  
Harry couldn’t breathe. The wind filled his lungs and snatched the air he had got so used to commanding away. It laughed and roared in his ears, and he knew that he could fall, and he would be as vulnerable to a storm now as any other creature on Hurricane.  
  
Then he did begin to fall.  
  
Harry turned his head upwards, because if he was going to die than he wanted Draco to be his last sight, and stretched out his hand. His mind was full of Teddy, and his friends, who might be drawn here next, but his eyes were full of Draco, and his surging power reached out towards the bond. Perhaps he could touch Draco one more time before he died. It might amuse Bodiless to allow that, in fact.  
  
The bond formed up between them, firmed, as Harry concentrated on it. And then Draco’s voice came singing along it, harsh and strained.  
  
 _What are you doing? You know it controls things. You know that you’re going to die._  
  
It was probably only the speed of thought that allowed that comment of Draco’s to reach him before he hit, Harry thought. Either that, or Bodiless had tossed him higher than he knew and was controlling the fall to make it hurt more. He answered anyway.  _But die looking at you. That makes it worth it._  
  
Draco seemed to grow closer to him, though doubtless that was only the air hammering in his brain and the consciousness leaving him. Harry reached out one dreamy hand, ready to caress Draco’s face and touch his hair a last time.  
  
Winds snared his hand, dragged it back to his side, and flung him upwards again. Harry had been right. This fall was under the control of Bodiless, and it would only let him die when it wanted to.  
  
 _When it thinks I learned my lesson?_  
  
 _That would be never._  
  
They were speaking, and at least Harry knew that Draco was saying what he wished to, even if those words only came through because  _Bodiless_ wished them to. Their minds were free and open, feeding into each other’s, and as Bodiless hauled Harry up and hung him in front of Draco, their eyes met.  
  
Draco concentrated on the bond and said,  _Listen. I wanted to tell you something._ And magic and emotion came flooding along it, so much and so many that Harry couldn’t separate them and be sure what Draco’s message was, but he thought he knew. He reached out a hand, and Bodiless dragged it back to his side again.  
  
 _I want to tell you something back,_ he said, and pushed love at Draco, all he could feel right now, surpassing even the fear and the rage that made him want to fight Bodiless.  
  
Draco’s eyes met his again, and there was such wonder in his face that Harry wanted to weep. It said what they could have enjoyed together, if they hadn’t come north and hadn’t come to Hurricane.  
  
But coming to Hurricane was what had given them to each other in the first place. They would have had no reason to cross paths on Earth, if they had stayed there.  
  
So Harry was thinking, and comforting himself with the thinking, and, he hoped, Draco, when Draco said,  _Harry. It isn’t—it isn’t controlling what we think, anymore. I can think anything I like, and I can feel it trying to prevent me, but it can’t._  
  
Harry didn’t question him. For one thing, he’d had the experience of free thoughts himself in the last few minutes, to prove Draco right. For another, he thought that he didn’t want to hurt Draco again by questioning him about something true.  
  
And for another, he was concentrating on the bond and yanking with all his might, driving their magic and their thoughts together, pulling against Bodiless, like a lunge of wild animals against the chains that held them.  
  
There was a shivering screech, and the world around them broke and fell in shards. Winds tried to batter them, but they were free, as long as they concentrated on the bond they were free, and Draco was the one who had discovered it, brilliant wonderful Draco, and Harry wasn’t so bad himself, and as long as their minds ran together it was brilliant, and they wheeled—  
  
And they fled like great birds to the east and south, while Bodiless roared and battered at the winds behind them.


	22. Understanding Hurricane

Harry and Draco both landed on the grass not far from Ron and Hermione, at last, at long last. Harry was panting so hard that he could  _feel_ his lungs laboring to take in the air, and Draco was quiet beside him, only twisting his head back now and then to study the sky behind them as if he imagined that would let him see the now-distant mountain.  
  
"What the fuck  _happened_?" Hermione stalked towards them, her hands on her hips.  
  
Harry held up one hand and took a few minutes to breathe and get the air used to moving in normal patterns in and out of his lungs again. Hermione waited, although she tapped her foot every now and then and shook her head at Ron. Ron waited with shadowed eyes.  
  
 _He knows some of what happened,_ Harry thought, straightening and meeting his best friend's eyes,  _and why I had to go after Draco.  
  
You would have gone after him, if Bodiless had torn him away.  
  
I would have gone to the rescue of anyone taken, _Harry agreed calmly.  _But not with as much desperation as I flew after you._  
  
The emotions flowing down the bond turned cool and clear. Harry smiled and addressed Hermione. "Bodiless called Draco again, and this time it took possession of his mind. Sorry that I left you like that, but I was afraid of where it would take him if I hesitated."  
  
Hermione raised her eyebrows. "And you managed to get him away? I don't understand that." Harry could hear the temper boiling under her voice, which always showed up when she didn't understand something the first time around. "Bodiless is strong enough to send birds out of season against the mummidade. How did you get away?"  
  
"Because of the bond," Harry said. He had thought about it as they flew back, and it was the only explanation that made sense. "When we concentrated on that and focused everything on maintaining it instead of fighting Bodiless's magic, then we tore free."  
  
Hermione's mouth dropped open slightly. Draco muttered in the back of his head,  _I would have preferred if you had just said that we were so strong and awesome that we tore free on our own. Now she's going to think you're lying._  
  
Harry shook his head.  _I don't think so,_ he said, pointing at Hermione with his chin.  _Look at the way she's staring at us. She already has an idea. That's one reason I wanted to tell her. She might know what it means, where I don't.  
  
She's not _that  _intelligent._  
  
"The mummidade are connected to each other," Hermione whispered. "They don't even  _exist_ as individuals apart from each other. And the riders that we saw--what if they're bonded to their beasts in the same way that you and Malfoy are bonded?"  
  
"Thank you for putting that  _disgusting_ image in the head of an invalid, Granger," Draco muttered behind her.  
  
Hermione shook her head at him. "I didn't mean that the bond would be exactly the same in all ways, of course. I mean that if minds are tied to each other, then there's more than one person doing the resisting. It would make sense for why the mummidade are bonded and why the riders are, if they are." She ignored Draco's muttering about how two sentient species was not a large sample size and turned to Harry and Ron, gesturing wildly. " _Think_ about it! There's no real reason for a magical bond to form between you two, since it's not like you have the same magic or anything. Why would the bond form? What purpose does it serve? What if it's a kind of defense against Bodiless? I  _wondered_ why, if Bodiless was so powerful, it didn't just call the mummidade north and eat them. What if it can't? What if part of the reason they are the way they are is a defense against  _it_?"  
  
"Well done," Ron murmured behind her. Hermione started and flushed, a shy smile on her lips.  
  
" _If_ it's true," Draco reminded everyone.  
  
 _I think it is,_ Harry said to him.  _Remember that we couldn't really escape and I was ready to die, and then the bond snapped us free. There's no other reason for that. Why should we be able to have that sudden strength except that we were closer than we had been? Bodiless should never have let me come up to you like that._  
  
 _That means it won't make the same mistake again._  
  
Harry cocked his head in acknowledgment, but didn't take his eyes off Ron and Hermione's happy faces.  _But it also means that we're more likely to escape it, now that we know the secret.  
  
What's going to happen to Granger and Weasley, then? They're not bonded in the same way, and it might try calling Granger next._  
  
Harry shook his head. He didn't have an answer to that one yet, but he also didn't doubt that Hermione would come up with one. He tried his best to ignore Draco's snort, which was aloud instead of mental. Draco didn't have as much faith in his friends as Harry did. That was a given, and no reason to worry.  
  
They would come up with something.  
  
*  
  
Draco saw no reason to linger in the north after their little adventure with Bodiless. They knew, now, what force could be powerful enough to drive the birds south out of season, and they even had a motivation for going back early. Bodiless was probably irritated that the mummidade could resist it, and wanted to hurt them if it couldn't conquer them. Draco didn't know how in the world they would  _change_ things, but they knew the truth, and that had been what the mummidade asked them to come north to find.  
  
But it seemed leadership of their little expedition had shifted to Granger when Draco wasn't looking, and she had a different plan.  
  
"We need to communicate with the riders  _somehow_ ," she said as they sat around their fire that evening, Draco wrapped in thick blankets. He still had bruised bones and muscles from the way that Bodiless had slammed him around against the wind. "They live even closer to Bodiless than we do, and resist it. We need to figure out how."  
  
"They have their bonds to their beasts," Weasley said, stretching his toes out to the fire. "Which I don't think we can imitate."  
  
"You don't know that yet," Granger snapped back. "We don't even know how those bonds work, whether they're like the bond Harry and Draco share or something else." Draco noted silently that he was "Malfoy" when she was talking to him but "Draco" otherwise, which seemed odd. "Maybe we can have them if we capture some beasts of our own."  
  
"We haven't seen any wild ones yet," Harry pointed out, stretching flat beside Draco. Draco took his hand and gripped it in silence. Of course he had thanked Harry for coming to his rescue, but he wouldn't be able to say what he really wanted to until they were in private. "Maybe the tame ones are the only ones the riders associate with."  
  
Granger gave him a condescending look of the kind Draco had once hated her for. "That would make the most sense."  
  
"Then your plan of acquiring tame ones has a flaw," Draco murmured, closing his eyes to escape her glare. "Why would they give up bonded beasts, or ones that some of their own people could bond to?"  
  
There was a disconcerted pause. Draco smiled, ignoring the way that Harry scolded him in his head, like a flurry of snowflakes. It  _was_ a flaw worth pointing out, and not his fault if Granger hadn't thought far enough ahead.  
  
"Well," Granger said at last, "they probably wouldn't want to. But we could persuade them, somehow." She sounded more hopeful than Draco thought the matter merited.   
  
Draco snorted and opened his eyes. "The solution seems obvious to me. Encourage human-human bonds, like the one that Harry and I have. Then we could have people safe in camp, without needing to add another species that might get along with us or not."  _And without encountering the resistance in camp that we do whenever something changes,_ he added in private to Harry.  
  
 _You want to avoid dealing with the politics.  
  
Shut up, so do you._  
  
Harry snuggled a bit closer to him, and Draco wished he could have focused on that rather than Granger saying, "Well, I don't think that would work. There are an odd number of people in the camp even with two bonded, and we don't know that everyone will develop the wild magic to make it possible."  
  
"No, an even number now, with the youngest Weasley bonded to her bird," Draco pointed out, smiling at Granger, who looked as if she might be eternally miffed. He  _did_ so enjoy showing her that she wasn't the only one on Hurricane who had some intelligence. "And there's no reason that the bonds couldn't function between more than one pair of people. Look at the mummidade. Their whole culture is based on bonding in different-sized groups. Maybe we could all bond together." He squeezed Harry's hand at the same time, trying to convey that he didn't really want to bond with anyone except him, but was saying otherwise to placate Granger.  
  
Harry snorted and said, "I don't know if I would call what the mummidade have a culture, but your point is well-taken."  
  
"We just don't  _know_ ," Granger said, putting her hands on her hips again even though she was sitting down, and frowning at them. "That's the point. We need to speak to people who can tell us, and that's the riders."  
  
"Not the mummidade?" Draco widened his eyes innocently. "I thought that Harry and I could speak to them through our bond. I must have imagined that part."  
  
Granger spent some more time glaring. Harry was the one who leaned forwards and said, with a quiver of laughter in his voice, "It's true that we have to struggle to understand what the mummidade say. But we'd have the same problem with the riders. And we have a channel of communication open with the mummidade."  
  
"I just hate leaving this place without knowing what we've accomplished, if anything," Granger said, turning her glare on the meadow.  
  
"We've accomplished plenty," Weasley said, slinging an arm around her shoulder and kissing her forehead. Draco had to look away. "Discovered a new species, learned about Bodiless, and learned about what it takes to resist Bodiless. I'd say that's a pretty good haul of treasure for an expedition as limited as this one is."  
  
" _Who_ learned what it takes to resist Bodiless?" Draco asked the mountains.  
  
"Fine, some of us did," Weasley said, and he was the one who grinned this time, and Draco the one who found it disconcerting. "You'll have to get used to being spoken of as part of the group, Malfoy. You are."  
  
Draco lifted his head and sniffed, ignoring the deep, warm fluttering in his middle that didn't come from the bond.  
  
*  
  
"I wanted to say thank you."  
  
Harry looked up. Draco was pressing near to him in the darkness, his eyes so wide that Harry was afraid for a moment Bodiless had possessed him once more, and then just that he was still stunned from the way he'd been slung around the sky and then pulled back towards Harry. Harry was supposed to be on watch, and the bond had been so quiet for most of the evening that he'd thought Draco was asleep.  
  
 _You could have known otherwise if you wanted to, at any time._  
  
Harry had to admit that was true. Draco's mind was part of his now, sliding, fluid, one thought opening into another. He reached out his hand, and Draco clasped it and drew it towards him, his tongue flickering for a moment on the webs of skin between Harry's fingers, before he closed his lips and drew them into the warmth of his mouth.  
  
 _Oh. That kind of thanks._  
  
Draco laughed, soft and intimate and never going to carry to the place by the fire where Ron and Hermione slept, and drew Harry down onto a conjured blanket. "What made you think that I was going to thank you like a normal friend?"  
  
"Because you hadn't done this so far," Harry said, and closed his eyes as Draco's fingers pried open the buttons at his throat. He did pause a moment to send winds ranging outside the campsite, and investigating what they found there. If he was going to be distracted, he at least didn't want to make a poor job of the watch. This part of Hurricane had proven to be more dangerous than any other so far.  
  
Draco gave him an impatient whine, and Harry forgot about everything except for the emotions and sensations pulsing between them. He could feel the impatience between Draco's legs, especially, and fell on his back to pull his own up, assuming that Draco would want to be inside him as soon as possible.  
  
But Draco shook his head. His cheeks were bright and pink, his fingers nimble as he reached down to Harry's entrance, but he made no move to take himself out. Harry blinked at him. His emotions were so soft and diffuse that it was difficult to get a handle on what he wanted.  
  
Then Harry forgot about everything except those marvelous wet fingers sliding in and out of him, and moaned and spread his legs more. He did jump a little when Draco bent down to take him in his mouth, but not with fear. God, those  _ripples_ of pleasure spreading through his body, down to his belly and up to his chest...  
  
And he abruptly realized one reason why this felt even more intense than usual. Draco was feeding pleasure and feeling into the bond, down from the top of his head, up from the bottoms of his feet, and showing Harry what he felt as well.  
  
He  _shoved_ it into Harry, and Harry arched his back and moaned again. It felt like being fucked. It felt better than that. Then it felt like that again, from moment to moment never the same level. And Draco's mouth and fingers were there all the time, too, sucking and fucking him.  
  
It didn't take him long to come. He yawned a few seconds afterwards and rolled over, limp-limbed and trailing. It seemed like all the tension and terror of the last day had gone out of him with his orgasm.  
  
"Good," Draco whispered aloud, curling up around him. "You have no idea what it was like to see you come flying to my rescue, Harry."  
  
Harry smiled drowsily up at him and clasped his cheek. "Sure I do. I can feel what you're feeling, remember?"  
  
Draco kissed him, and wrapped Harry's thigh with his own legs, rubbing himself off. Harry watched his pale face flushing, his head tilting back no matter how hard he tried to maintain eye contact with Harry. He was magnificent, and they were bonded, and at the moment Harry felt like the luckiest lover on Earth.  
  
 _Or Hurricane._  
  
Of course Draco couldn't let something like that go, even when he was in the middle of gasping and coming.  
  
They curled up around each other when Draco was done, and closed their eyes. The guardian winds sped across the meadow beyond the camp, watching. The stars shone above them, different stars, in different patterns, but ones that Harry thought he was already learning to recognize. They slept.  
  
*  
  
"That's the  _stupidest_ thing I've ever felt."  
  
Draco sighed and stopped a distance from the fire. He was sure that he didn't want to know why Weasley was clutching his ears with both hands and staring into the north, but also that he would learn anyway, because Weasley and Granger never seemed to have learned about keeping these things to themselves, or dealing with them on their own.  
  
"What is it?" Granger was sitting up on the other side of the fire, her face still soft with sleep, yawning as she combed her hair. Draco was glad to see that she didn't treat Weasley as her lord and master  _every_ moment he required her attention, but he couldn't help but wonder what Granger would be like, how she could develop, if she was paired with someone else.  
  
Weasley finally dropped his hands, rubbing his ears as if they hurt. "I don't know exactly," he said. "It's like someone calling me."  
  
Draco took a step forwards before he could stop himself. Granger had looked at  _him_ , he realized, her fingers twitching in what looked almost like a spasm. They nodded at the same time and Granger said gently, "That's the same thing we felt calling us the other day, Ron, the same call that made us want to leave. The same creature Harry and Draco felt yesterday. That's Bodiless."  
  
Weasley met both of their eyes in turn, and for some reason, looked longer at Draco than at Granger, as if he thought he would be able to tell better when Draco was lying. Then he turned to Granger, shaking his head. "But I don't  _have_ any wild magic!"  
  
"I wonder," Granger said, her voice low and precise. Gone into research mode, Draco knew, and was a little disgusted that he could tell. "Draco developed offensive wild magic when he really wanted to stop that bird from killing Harry. I got the ability to read maps when I concentrated on the mystery of the silver ovals. You don't like the magic much, Ron. That kind of desire could be enough to spur its development."  
  
Weasley shook his head again. "But I haven't done anything! I would have to do something if I had it, wouldn't I?"  
  
Draco had to bite his lip when he realized that Weasley was pleading with  _him_. He spread his hands and shook his head. "I'm not the expert on the wild magic that Harry is," he said. "You should ask him."  
  
"He did develop it before the rest of us did," Weasley said, and turned abruptly to Harry, whom Draco had known was right behind him. "Mate! Do I feel like the wild magic to you? Only they say Bodiless is calling me, and I'm  _sure_ that can't be right."  
  
Harry paused for a moment, blinking, and Draco thought he saw a little twitch cross his lip. But he examined Weasley as gravely as though he was a Healer asked to take on a new patient, and shook his head at the end of it. "You don't feel any different to me than you did yesterday, mate."  
  
Weasley sagged in relief, but Harry raised his hand before he could say anything. "I could have a wind investigate you, though," he said. "They're more likely to tell me if something has changed about the wild magic in an area."  
  
"I'm not an  _area_ ," Weasley muttered, but he stood there, stiff and frowning, while the wind darted around him. Draco could feel it through the bond, but see it only in the ruffle of Weasley's ginger mop and the blink of his eyelashes it passed around his face. It seemed to linger there for a long time.  
  
Harry drew in an abrupt breath. Draco blinked, wondering what the wind had told him, and then realized that the wind had vanished.  
  
"That's it," Harry whispered. "Ron, my wind stopped existing when you frowned at it."  
  
"What does that mean?" Weasley folded his arms. "It just went back to join its big brothers and sisters in the sky?"  
  
Draco snickered, and then was appalled at himself for finding a Weasley amusing. But Harry was focused too much on said Weasley to notice. "You have the wild magic to deny wild magic," he said. "Draco, extend your claws towards him."  
  
Weasley had his wand out in an instant. "No, thanks," he said. "I've heard about what he can do, and that's worth even more than seeing it."  
  
"I won't hurt you."  
  
Draco paused over the reassurance in his voice, and so did Weasley, though Draco thought it was for different reasons. The silence resonated between them, though, and Granger and Harry looked back and forth between them, obviously wondering. Draco finally nodded and said, "I won't."  
  
"Fine," Weasley said, and stepped back, arms folded and the same scowl on his face that he had worn when Harry was investigating him with the wind. Draco reckoned that was at least even chances for this experiment to work.  
  
He extended his claws, and they kept growing as they went towards Weasley. At the moment, it felt no different than any other time he had done this: the cold air, the rasp of skin near his weapons the way feathers had been near them when he killed the bird, the thick hum of gathering power near his fingers--  
  
And then it was gone. If Bodiless had shut him away from his magic again, Draco thought, there could have been no greater barrier between him and it. He shook his hands, but Weasley didn't explode in shreds.  
  
"Yeah," Harry said. His face was bright with the smile that didn't use his mouth, which Draco thought the most beautiful of his expressions and preferred to see directed at him only. "You've got it."  
  
Weasley, luckily, didn't explode in the dancing and howling that Draco thought he might have if he had still regarded the wild magic as a disease. He just sighed, shook his head, and said, "We should go back to the camp now. We have a lot of news to report, and at least I can be useful in the ways you can now." He was looking at Granger when he said "you," so Draco decided graciously not to react.  
  
"We do," Harry said, and there was joy in him, springing and soaring joy, of the kind that Draco had felt when he was battling the riders and their beasts. "We have the kind of news that will change all our lives."  
  
And once again he flung them into the wind before anyone could argue about it, and only barely remembered to grab the packs on the way. 


	23. Going Home

The first sight of the camp made Draco swallow. There were still people moving down there, guards on the hills and people shifting back and forth in between the houses, and he had been half-afraid they would come in to find it deserted, abandoned, or destroyed.  
  
But they were going back with news that most of those people wouldn't want to hear, either, and he wondered what the reaction would be when they landed.  
  
Harry didn't seem to have any of the same doubts. He strained forwards against the bonds of his own winds as though he wished he could tear away from them and fly even faster, without magic. And he pulled against the bond with Draco in his mind, too, impatiently pushing joy at Draco when Draco tried to flinch away from it.  
  
 _What do you think will happen?_ Harry finally snapped.  _That they'll hate us for leaving? That they'll hate us for telling them that someone else lives on Hurricane? That they simply won't believe us?_  
  
 _Any and all of that,_ Draco said simply.  _I would think they'd reject each and every piece of news we're bringing, except that we had Weasley and Granger with us this time, and they trust them more._  
  
Harry scowled in his direction, and then flung them at the earth hard enough that Draco gasped and his ears felt as if they were going to tear away from his head. Harry almost immediately gentled the wind and sighed at him.  _I'm sorry, Draco. I shouldn't punish you for your fear. I feel some of the same thing.  
  
Only some?  
  
I have you with me._  
  
Draco wished he could be sure--as he couldn't, even with the bond--whether the "you" meant him, or both him and Harry's friends. Before he could think to ask, though, they were landing, near that day's sentry, who turned out to be Andromeda. She had Teddy with her, running and talking with himself, and sometimes with a stuffed dog, on the grass near her side.  
  
Teddy turned around, saw them, and began to run. Draco saw Andromeda put out a hand as if to restrain him, but in the end, she grimaced and dropped it back to her side. Draco nodded austerely to her, wishing he could tell her "good choice" aloud without her misinterpreting it. Andromeda scowled back at him.  
  
Then Teddy sprang into Harry's arms, and Harry twirled him around and bowed his head over Teddy's, murmuring something to him that Draco could only have made out with the help of the bond.  
  
He didn't try. It  _was_ right that Harry put Teddy first in some ways, because, after all, he had helped raise Teddy, and had decided to come to Hurricane in the first place to give Teddy a better future. He hadn't come for Draco, or his friends. Everyone was equally an outsider when it came to Harry and his relationship with Teddy.  
  
 _And also, Bodiless might have been preying on your emotions even then, trying to influence you to be jealous._  
  
Draco nodded.  _I know that our bonds with you are different, that we'll both be different things to you. I'm learning to live with that._  
  
Harry beamed at him, and then Teddy began to squirm and kick. Harry set him down. Teddy promptly ran the distance between him and Draco, his arms open as though he had no doubt of Draco's welcome.  
  
Draco blinked and picked him up. Teddy immediately held up the stuffed dog and said, "Grandma gave me  _this_. What's his name?"  
  
"I don't know," Draco said, and turned the dog over. It was made of wool on the outside, soft and white and scratchy, and had a long tail that would wag with a simple enchantment. Andromeda  _could_ do something other than grieve for her family, then. Draco made sure not to look at her while that particular uncharitable thought passed through his brain. "What did you name him?"  
  
" _Best_ ," said Teddy in satisfaction. "Because he's my best friend."  
  
Draco hugged Teddy, and set him down. "Why don't you show me how you and Best play?" he suggested, and Teddy immediately began to run in a circle, trotting Best beside him and barking sometimes, talking others. Draco sat back to watch him, only observing from the corner of his eye as Weasley and Granger went up to talk to Andromeda.  
  
Whatever they were telling her, it seemed she took it better from them than she might have from Draco, or maybe even Harry. She flinched and bowed her head, but then nodded. Draco could see the shape of her lips when she lifted her head and looked down at the camp. "It's important for them to know."  
  
"It  _is_ ," Granger said, and she and Weasley followed Andromeda down the hill.  
  
Harry was watching Draco and Teddy. Draco let Teddy show him how he played with Best for a few more minutes before he stepped forwards and picked him up again. "Why don't we go down, and you can show me how you play with Best in the camp?" he asked.  
  
"Hide and seek!" Teddy wriggled hard enough that Draco put him down again, and he raced off, tripping over his shoes now and then. Harry was smiling.  
  
"He needs new shoes," he murmured. "Someone besides me is going to have to Transfigure them, though. All I can really do is shave off pieces of leather with my winds. Or polish them, maybe."  
  
"See what you lost by giving up wand magic?" Draco kept his voice light and teasing as they followed Teddy down the hill. "I hope no one else does. We're already at enough of a disadvantage when it comes to living on Hurricane, without everyone abandoning their tame magic for wild magic."  
  
"I made a choice that I can't take back," Harry said quietly. "And some of them got made for me." But his hand reached out and clasped Draco's hard enough that Draco gasped a little. " _Thank_ you."  
  
Draco didn't ask for what. The whole point was that neither of them could, probably, define what they were saying thanks for. He walked down the hill behind Harry, and his stomach and his head both rang with satisfaction.  
  
*  
  
"If we had a Pensieve, things would be better."  
  
That was about the third time Bill had said something like that. Harry glared at him. "No," he said. "If you had come with us, things would be better, or if we could explain it clearly enough to satisfy all your doubts, then things would be better. But don't pretend that you would suddenly believe everything if you saw it in a Pensieve. You wouldn't."  
  
Bill flushed, but rose to his feet. Again they were sitting in a circle in the center of the camp, and again everyone--except Ginny, this time--seemed as if they were reluctant to accept the majority of what Harry and Draco had said. Ron and Hermione's voices hadn't helped as much as Harry had thought they would.  
  
"You're telling us that these riders, with their beasts, exist, and just happen to have come up with a way to resist Bodiless," Bill began. "Which called all of you, and then  _you_  won free because of the bond that you have with Malfoy. It's a wild story."  
  
"It's  _a different world_. It would be a wild story on Earth, but why are you acting as though what happened on Earth restricts what can happen on Hurricane?" Harry leaned forwards. "Why?"  
  
Bill hesitated, and looked at Fleur. Fleur, seated with Victoire on her lap, gave Bill an even look, and then turned to Harry.  
  
"Bill still fears 'is own predatory nature," she said. "'E thinks that without constant supervision, 'e will give in and become a werewolf. And now you tell us of something that may call 'im. 'E is terrified."  
  
"That is  _not_ the reason," Bill snapped, flushing.  
  
"Your objections are getting tiresome." Draco lounged back on the grass next to Harry, playing with Teddy now and then. "This makes sense of some of the things that have puzzled us on Hurricane, like why the mummidade always go around in at least pairs. And it's not any less believable than our stories about the sea. Or are you going to disbelieve your own brother and sister now?"  
  
"I saw some things near the sea even more incredible than what they saw, Bill," Ginny added, leaning forwards with a small grin. "Why do you believe me and not them? They have more witnesses, even."  
  
Bill glared at her this time, and again Fleur interpreted, her head bowed and a small smile on her face as she began to braid stands of Victoire's hair together. "You are 'is sister, and you brought news of more food, not potentially uncomfortable news."  
  
Bill turned around to face her. "I haven't been as hostile to them as I used to be, Flower," he whispered. "You know I haven't."  
  
 _Flower?_ Draco commented in Harry's head.  _And he thinks this is some sort of clever nickname?_  
  
Harry brushed Draco's words away like a fly, just grateful that he hadn't said them aloud, and murmured, "We're telling the truth, Bill. If we'd brought more Veritaserum with us, then maybe we could convince you of that. Or Pensieves, yeah. But ultimately, you have to choose between what will allow us to survive on Hurricane--like believing the rest of us--or ignoring and doubting everything and holding us back. I thought you'd already made that choice, but maybe I was wrong."  
  
Bill glared at him, and Harry thought he heard a growl rumbling in his chest. Harry looked back, unimpressed. He was stronger now than Bill could ever dream of being, unless Bill also developed wild magic that was equal to Harry's in intensity. A few werewolf traits didn't bother him.  
  
 _He would still have to develop a bond to someone equally strong to be your_ true  _peer._  
  
Harry let the corner of his mouth curl in response to Draco's announcement, and didn't move his eyes from Bill's face.  
  
"You don't know how hard this is for me," Bill whispered. "Urges towards raw meat all the time, wondering how the moons of this world are going to affect me, feeling my scars throb at night."  
  
"Those are all worrying things, and I can see why they occupy your mind," Harry said, immediately, quietly, as compassionately as he could. "But I don't see how that leads back to doubting us every time we say something."  
  
Bill sat down and folded his arms in front of him as though he assumed acting childish would get him out of explaining. When Harry, and Draco, and Ron, and Hermione, and Ginny, all stared at him, he seemed to realize it wouldn't. He huffed, considered his feet, and began.  
  
"I didn't think the scars had any effect on me until I came here. A few dreams, mostly nightmares about Greyback scratching me. But then we got here, and I was hungry all the time. I was afraid I was transforming into a werewolf, and the only thing that would stop it was enough meat. There  _wasn't_ any. I started thinking I'd been stupid to agree to come along, and no matter how bad things got in the wizarding world, they couldn't be as bad as they were here.  
  
"Then you accepted  _him_." Bill nodded at Draco, whose emotions coming down the bond became smoother and cooler than usual. "You accepted him more than me. You weren't constantly accusing  _him_  of acting like an idiot and destroying the camp."  
  
"Because he wasn't telling me outright that I was an idiot, too, and that the most important thing I could do was bring back meat for him," Harry said shortly.  
  
Bill stared at him. "I told you why I did that, how afraid I was."  
  
"Yes, but I didn't know you were afraid at the time." Harry met his eyes. "Now that I know, I can forgive you for a lot of what happened then."  _And now that you're sitting down and talking like a rational being instead of just raging about it, I can believe you more easily, too,_ he thought, and felt Draco hum in agreement. "Instead, you just seemed committed to blaming everyone for your hunger."  
  
"He was the one responsible for getting me scratched!" Bill's voice soared as he pointed one finger straight at Draco. "And you  _accepted_ him!"  
  
Harry grimaced. "Because we need everyone to survive here. It became something else later, but it wasn't more than that at the time. What should I have done? Kicked him out to appease you? That would have made you feel a little better, maybe, but it wouldn't have done anything about the hunger. Or the way that you're doubting Ron and Hermione as well as me and Draco."  
  
Draco leaned forwards and put a hand on Harry's shoulder, saying without words that he wasn't going anywhere. Harry squeezed his hand, but didn't take his eyes from Bill.  
  
Bill struggled in silence for a moment, then said, "But you kicked  _Primrose_ out. Why not him?"  
  
"We couldn't really afford her loss," Harry said. "We were bloody lucky that Ginny found the ocean after that, and that Primrose taught us about the rabbits before she left. I let her go because she wanted to, and she wasn't comfortable around us, or the bird. I'm not going to kick people out because they make others uncomfortable."  
  
Bill stared at Draco. "I don't know if I can forgive him even now."  
  
"You don't have to forgive me," Draco said, so mildly that he looked mature, in contrast to the ravening way Bill looked.  _And don't I know it,_ he told Harry. "You just have to work with me, and be polite to me, and stop bringing up your scratches at every opportunity. We all have lots to suffer from. Our memories of the war." For a moment, so small that Harry doubted most people would notice it, he glanced at Andromeda. "Our fear and worry about the wild magic." A glance at Ron. "Our pasts." This time, he looked at Harry. "You're the only one who's been letting it override him so much that he used his panic to hurt other people and consistently disbelieve them."  
  
"I told you why I was afraid!"  
  
"And now eez the time to  _stop_." Fleur took her husband's arm and leaned her head on his shoulder, closing her eyes a moment. "Now eez the time to be  _looking_ at the future and seeing what we can do. Not blaming ozzers, Bill, no matter 'ow tempting it is."  
  
Bill looked at her in adoration that Harry didn't think was feigned. He wondered idly for a moment if that was the way he looked at Draco from the outside.  
  
 _Not nearly that soppy,_ Draco disagreed, and twisted around so that his chin rested on Harry's shoulder in place of his hand.  
  
Bill swallowed loudly. "Are you going to help me?" he whispered to Fleur, and bent his head over Victoire's hair.  
  
"I will." Fleur kissed his hair, and that was the point where Harry had to look away, although he told himself to remember that he and Draco probably made other people just as uncomfortable, kissing each other the way they did in public.  
  
 _We are much better to look at._  
  
Harry bit his lip to avoid laughing, and nodded. "Good," he said. "So  _that's_ settled." He turned his back on Bill and looked around at the other Weasleys. "What do you think? Should we move north? Try to go back to the riders and communicate with them? Develop our wild magic and our bonds as fast as possible?"  
  
"No," said Andromeda. "None of that. We should stay the way we are, and not let this world overpower or change us."  
  
Harry reminded himself not to sigh or roll his eyes. He  _did_ think Andromeda had got over her mindless opposition to Draco and the way she was afraid he might change her relationships with Teddy and Harry. Harry nodded at her. "But do you think we can stop wanting and wishing? Because the wild magic develops when we do that. Just ask Ron." Ron grimaced at Harry, but he'd already had to show several times that he could destroy wild magic near him, so it wasn't like this was letting out a secret. "And then resisting Bodiless becomes a concern."  
  
"I do not think it a concern." Andromeda half-shrugged. "It cannot reach us here. We need only never go north."  
  
"What happens when our children do, someday?" Draco's voice was easy, but there was an emphasis on  _our_ that Harry thought he was the only one to understand, remembering the mummid ritual. He touched the bond and plucked it like a harpstring, but Draco was looking at Andromeda, and didn't acknowledge him. "What happens when they develop wild magic powerful enough to attract Bodiless's attention? Or when someone unbonded simply vanishes one night, and we never learn what happened to them?"  
  
Andromeda stood up. Teddy glanced at her curiously for a minute, and then went back to playing with some of his little fish-creatures in the bowls of water. His sight was developing fast, Harry thought, and wondered if they should have told Ron and Hermione about Teddy's wild magic.  
  
"Hurricane will strip us of everything we are, if we let it," Andromeda said, her voice thin but passionate. "Everything that makes us human. And we will say that it  _should_ , and sit still for it! Well, I will not. I want no wild magic. I will stay here, in the first place we chose to be human, and build human houses, and eat human food. Nothing else."  
  
Draco caught Harry's eyes, and shook his head minutely. Harry nodded grimly back, then said in the bond, so that Andromeda couldn't see them and take exception to what they were doing,  _Well, we should have known that she wasn't going to give up tamely, I suppose._  
  
"Are you going to cut off your hands if you develop wild magic in them, then?" Draco asked aloud. "Or your eyes, if it enhances your sight?" Harry knew that he only kept his hands from straying towards Teddy with an effort, and shuddered a little. Harry was suddenly glad that they'd told no one else about Teddy's wild magic. "Weasley here didn't want any, but it showed up. Intense desire to avoid it is still desire."  
  
"I will use my wand," Andromeda said, with dignity that Harry had to admit was immense. "I will use the magic I was born with, not the magic that something  _else_ tries to infect me with."  
  
"If we stay here, then we can't stay motionless," Draco said. "I just don't understand how you think you're going to avoid Hurricane changing you."  
  
"By refusal." Andromeda held out her wand. "And if nothing else will suffice, we might still return through the gate to the wizarding world. There are only a limited number of passes possible through it, but it seems as though  _some_ people want to remain here anyway." She caught glance after glance, and Harry thought she was as good at mind-reading at the moment as Harry and Draco were, in her own limited way. "Can any of you who don't have the wild magic say that you're  _happy_ here?"  
  
"The wizarding world was worse," Molly murmured, but she didn't sound convinced.  
  
"The wizarding world didn't turn us into werewolves, or make us into monsters," Andromeda said, and her voice cracked down the middle with her passion. "You might be willing to take the chance by staying here. I am  _not_." And she picked up Teddy, turned, and walked towards her house.  
  
Harry stood up and walked over to catch up with her. Andromeda didn't turn to face him, but a muscle ticked in her face, and she nodded a little.  
  
"I know what I said," she said quietly. "And I know that you have to stay here, that your wild magic probably won't let you leave."  
  
 _Would it let Teddy go through the gate?_ Harry wondered, and felt the hiss of Draco's anger in the back of his mind.  _Probably not, and she's breaking up Teddy's life and destroying everything we've achieved because of her fear._ That last thought might have been his or Draco's.  
  
"I don't understand why you changed your mind," Harry chose to say instead. " _Why_ would you want to go back to Earth when you know that the majority of us won't go with you, and when nothing has changed except some new information?"  
  
Andromeda stopped dead and turned to stare at him, holding Teddy close to her. Teddy made a protest, but it was so sleepy Andromeda might not have heard it. She looked at Harry, and looked, and looked.  
  
"You bring us word of an enemy that can devour us, magic that will infect us no matter what we do, and another species that the world truly belongs to," Andromeda said quietly, shaking her head. "And you have the gall to tell me that nothing has changed."  
  
"If the wild magic is going to infect you anyway, then you shouldn't care about escaping." Draco came to a halt on the other side of Andromeda, and Harry felt the bond between them churning with plans to snatch Teddy. He gave Draco a quick snarl. That would be the worst thing they could do right now. "You can't escape. You'll develop it whether you want it or not, so you might as well accept it as inevitable."  
  
"We all die," Andromeda said. "And yet we struggle against the inevitable. Well, I've chosen my struggle."  
  
"You'll hurt Teddy," Harry said, deciding there was nothing else they could do. Draco made a quick negative motion, but didn't actually try to shut him up, something he could have done easily. "He already has wild magic. He can see the fish and other creatures in the water better than any of us. If you're right about us not being able to go back through the gate now that we've adapted to Hurricane, the same prohibition would apply to him."  
  
Andromeda bowed her head. Then she lifted it, and although she had gone paler, said, "I will try anyway. He deserves to grow up in a place that isn't as wild and desperate and dangerous as this, without  _enemies_ calling from the north."  
  
"The Ministry chose to exile a huge portion of its population, and those people were willing to go." Draco took a step forwards. " _We_ were willing to go. You think that the wizarding world would be any less dangerous for him? The child of a Metamorphmagus and a known werewolf? They would reject him, too."  
  
"He should have a  _choice_." Andromeda's arms tightened around Teddy like a vice. "He should live in the world his parents died to defend."  
  
Draco opened his mouth, but Harry caught his eye and shook his head. Andromeda was getting upset enough now not to care about the way she might hurt Teddy physically. They would have to retreat now and come back later.  
  
"I hope you can reconsider and see that this isn't an infection, and isn't a disease," Harry told her, trying to ignore the hostile way she stared at him. "I hope you'll see that the best thing for everyone is to stay here." And he turned and walked away with Draco close behind him, leaving Andromeda to carry Teddy out of sight.  
  
*  
  
Draco had had his doubts about Harry's course of action, but they weren't fulfilled until the next morning, when Andromeda didn't come out of the house for her share of guard duty, and peering in revealed she was gone.  
  
And Teddy with her.


	24. To the Gate

"She could only have gone in a limited number of directions."  
  
Harry's voice was quiet but intense, and he kept his eyes on his hands as if they were one of Granger's maps. Draco kept quiet himself. He could feel of all of Harry's emotions through the bond, and anyone who might think he was blasé about this was wrong. The hostile stares coming at them from every direction were almost comforting, by now. They couldn't do anything right in the eyes of those who hated them, so they might as well not try.  
  
"That doesn't  _help_." The Dragon-Keeper was chewing one nail. He seemed fonder of Teddy than Draco had realized. Perhaps he felt the same affection for any young thing that could be raised from a hatchling, as he would think of them. "What could  _help_ is knowing whether or not she knew the country well enough to Apparate across it to the gate."  
  
Harry looked up. "And you think that's the kind of thing she and I commonly discussed?" He shook his head. "Our main topic of conversation was Teddy."  
  
"Well,  _someone_ must have known her well enough," the original Weasley said, pushing thick red hair out of his eyes. He turned to the matriarch. "Mum?"  
  
Mrs. Weasley stared down at her own hands and shook her head. Draco stirred. He was getting tired of that useless, helpless gesture. If no one else took the problem into their hands soon,  _he_ would, and he doubted any of them wanted him doing that.  
  
"I knew she wasn't happy here, and that she missed her daughter and husband," Mrs. Weasley whispered. "But most of the time, she seemed resigned to living on Hurricane, and she  _delighted_ in Teddy." Draco held back the snort at that pronouncement; he felt the stirring, blurred agreement from Harry, and that was enough to content him. "That doesn't mean I ever thought she would do something like this."  
  
"I don't think anyone anticipated it." Harry's voice was gentle. "It's possible that she's already Apparated to the gate and gone through it. In that case, we can't do anything but go there and rescue Teddy, if he had to remain behind." He stood up. "But I'm going to assume that she hasn't yet, either because she doesn't know the country between there and here well enough, or because she doesn't actually remember where the gate  _is_. My winds can get me there faster."  
  
" _You_ know where it is?" Draco tilted his head back to watch Harry's face. He knew the answer already, of course, thanks to the bond, but he asked the question aloud for the benefit of the Weasleys.  _See? I can be kind._  "It let us all out into the middle of a featureless plain. Why should you have any more luck finding it than she could?"  
  
"The winds will tell me the sources of all the wizarding magic on Hurricane, if I wanted to ask them," Harry said. "It  _feels_ different from the wild magic. They'll take me back to the gate, especially since they would probably be most familiar with it. It's the point where wizarding magic first showed up on this world."  _And yes, you're kind, and smug with it. Shut up._  
  
"Wait, wait, wait." Granger stood up. "You mean that you could allow us to find other villages, or camps, that people have set up? Harry, that's  _wonderful._  All we would have to do is wait for someone to use a spell, and then we could join up with more people!"  
  
The rest of the Weasel tribe was opening their mouths, too, and Draco  _knew_ they would get distracted with something that, in the end, wasn't all that important, and force Harry away from retrieving Andromeda and Teddy. He half-raised his eyebrow, and Harry gave him a slight nod.  _I get to be the mean one because they already think I am._  
  
"When we have less pressing matters to attend to, I'm sure Harry will be happy to help us find other people," Draco drawled. "Bearing in mind that they might not want to see us, or might be former Death Eaters."  
  
That shut Granger up for the moment, and allowed Harry to step into the breach, making plans with a smoothness that they doubtless allowed him because of the way he'd led them in the past. Harry and Draco would head for the gate, watching for signs of Andromeda and Teddy along the way. Harry would send winds scouting not only for signs of wizarding magic but for Teddy. They had watched out for him before and would be familiar with him.  
  
Ginny would take a broom and fly a zigzag path around the camp, hoping to locate Andromeda. The rest of them would mount an increased watch in the camp, and Hermione would start mapping out intense patches of wild magic nearby, so that they would know where the closest dangers to them were.  
  
 _And maybe help, as well,_ Harry told Draco.  _The best thing we can do now, I think, is expose everyone to the wild magic and hope they develop it so they can stop feeling inferior._  
  
Draco privately agreed, but sent an image of Bodiless--or the non-image of power and arrogance that he had received when Bodiless tried to imprison him--and a question mark.  
  
Harry pressed silence back firmly, and then his winds swept Draco off the ground and into the center of the hurricane. Draco got a little of his own back by cutting some of them and dropping down to a lower level than Harry so he could scan the ground more effectively. Then they were gone, flying for the gate.  
  
*  
  
Harry could feel the winds all around him when he concentrated.  
  
It wasn't like that was a  _new_ thing, and from the way disgust rose like steam from Draco, he didn't find being subjected to Harry's thoughts about the wind very interesting, either. But Harry hadn't noticed before how much the winds would change and arch in new directions if he let his mind ride them. He could tell them to guard, and they'd do that. Or they'd bring back sounds to his ears, or let Ron and Hermione ride safely above the ground, or carry him without a broom.  
  
He'd grown so used to that, he no longer really thought about the way they bonded his mind to  _Hurricane_ as well as Draco, moved him through the ecology of winds, let him dance and round up perceptions that weren't available to the others, because their magic didn't extend so far.  
  
 _Yes, you're very special, Potter. Shut up._  
  
Harry shook his head and smiled.  _Right, sorry. We're supposed to be looking for Teddy and Andromeda anyway, not singing my praises._  
  
He received a wordless response from Draco about which he would rather be doing. Harry only nodded and reached out with his winds again, sending them tracking away from him in huge spirals. It seemed to be the way that most natural winds on Hurricane--assuming anything on this planet was natural given the amount of wild magic--wanted to move, and it would cover a lot of ground, with enough repetitions that they might catch Andromeda as she popped up from an Apparition.  
  
Assuming she  _could_. Harry would have had trouble navigating the rippling plains beneath him if the winds didn't pinpoint the gate for him as an eddy of unfamiliar power in the airscape of Hurricane. Perhaps Andromeda had memorized some point near the gate or left a signal for herself, but Harry didn't think so. She had been pretty dazed in those first days, lost in her grief with only the need to care for Teddy overcoming it, the way she had been for the last two years in the wizarding world.  
  
 _What happens if we get there and she's already gone through?_  
  
Draco's question made Harry swallow, though primarily because he'd been trying to avoid thinking about it.  _We're moving fast,_ Harry said, to dodge it.  _I don't really think we would get there and find out she's not present.  
  
But it might happen, and I want you to face it. Will you go back to Earth to look for Teddy?_  
  
Harry set his jaw. He had come to Hurricane for Teddy. Focusing on Teddy, raising him and protecting him, had been his only reason for existence, it sometimes felt like, in the two years since the war.  
  
But then again...  
  
He had cared when Bill and the other Weasleys would be randomly arrested, stopped and searched, or harassed by the Ministry because of their connection to him. He had tried sometimes to get Andromeda to let go of her grief and stop living again. He had taken all the precautions necessary to try and find out about going to Hurricane safely, and he had worked on his wandless magic--as he had thought his abilities with wind were then--and he had subtly and not-so-subtly threatened enemies into backing off.  
  
His life hadn't been wholly Teddy. It had only seemed like it at the time, and sometimes his friends had said so, so Harry had run into the bad habit of letting his mind rewrite the past.  
  
 _That's what I mean._ Draco's voice was soft in his head, and at the same time as loud as the thunder of hooves.  _If I go back to Earth, there's every chance I'll lose my wild magic. What sustains it is the environment of Hurricane. You would probably retain yours since you had it before you came through the gate. I don't want to go back, Harry.  
  
You'll make me choose between you and Teddy? _Harry could have shouted, but his voice would have tattered in the wind anyway, unless he willed it to carry the sound to Draco's ear. He might as well push his anger down the bond instead.  
  
 _I mean that if we get to the gate and find signs that they've already passed through, then I'm staying behind._  
  
Harry shut his eyes and nodded. Draco's fears made sense, and Harry had no reason to think he was  _wrong_. Draco wouldn't risk losing the bond and his magic. Those things made Hurricane home for him now, livable, in a way that the wizarding world would never be.  
  
And they only knew that as many people could pass through the gate to Hurricane as possible, but that there were a limited number of returns back through the gate to the wizarding world, mostly used by the Unspeakables who had explored it. They didn't know, not for certain, what would happen if someone who had become used to Hurricane passed back through to Earth and then attempted to return home to Hurricane again.  
  
 _I don't want her to take Teddy through. I don't want it to have happened._  
  
But that wouldn't prevent it from happening if it had. Harry bowed his head and flew, tugging with the wind on Draco until Draco reminded him sharply that there were some people here whose power was different. Harry nodded and slowed them both a little bit, reaching back through the bond now and then to touch Draco's mind.  
  
Draco's mind was always steady and solid, like a boulder made of gold, lit from within, pulsing his reassurance.  
  
 _We will find them. Your winds will bring you word, and I think it unlikely that Andromeda knew enough landmarks to Apparate. She wasn't paying much attention to anything except you and Teddy and your baggage then._  
  
And Harry nodded, and leaned on his partner. Even knowing Draco wouldn't come through the gate with him if he decided to go was, in its own way, a comfort. Someone who knew what they wanted and didn't rely on him to make all the decisions always was.  
  
*  
  
The gate was visible from a distance, once Draco knew what he was looking for. It was a ragged hole in the air, as white as though it opened onto one of the corridors of St. Mungo's, beaming with light that died a few meters away from it. The grass near it was trampled as though their walking over it had permanently flattened it, although Draco supposed that could also be from wizards who had come back to step through it or mummidade coming to investigate it.  
  
And there was no one in sight, and no convenient scraps of cloth or recent footprints to indicate someone had gone through it in the last few hours.  
  
Draco sighed and restrained his hopes. They didn't know what time Andromeda had left during the night, and there had been no storm in the last day. Too, Hurricane's dawn came early and its twilight lingered late, in all the corners of the sky, so she would have had more light for traveling than during the equivalent hours on Earth.  
  
 _It's so comforting how you imagine all the worst possible scenarios so that my imagination doesn't have as much work to do._  
  
Draco smiled and brushed one hand down Harry's shoulder as they landed in front of the gate. "One of the reasons I'm here," he said aloud. "Also because you're a good fuck."  
  
Harry snorted at him, but couldn't conceal a smile, and since that had been all Draco was trying to achieve, he didn't find it that awkward. They turned to face the gate, and Draco blinked against the white light, which was even more piercing close.  
  
"How did you want to set up the guard?" Draco asked quietly, not looking at Harry. "She's hardly likely to approach openly once she sees we're here."  
  
"I want to make it as difficult as possible for her to get through," Harry said. "And we'll have to do something that I think is horrible, but then, her taking off in the middle of the night without knowing if she could even  _take_ Teddy through the gate is pretty horrible, too." He switched to the bond.  _I want you to remain in plain sight, as if you plan to stop them on your own. I'll be up and hovering. If necessary, I can dive down and take Teddy from her, or lend weight to your arguments.  
  
You won't try to stop _her  _from going through?  
  
If she has Teddy._  
  
Draco just raised his eyebrows at him, and Harry brushed his hand down his face.  _What else can I do? We've tried multiple times to persuade her that staying in Hurricane is the best thing for everyone. She won't listen. Or I thought she had, and then the news of this wild magic coming to everyone proved too much for her. I can't hold her prisoner here, and it's true that she would be safer in the wizarding world than she would here.  
  
You don't want Teddy to miss out on having his childhood with his grandmother, either._  
  
Harry nodded choppily.  _Yes, but I think it would be worse to keep her here and force her to try to do things against her will. That's asking for her to sabotage us. I don't want to do that. I just want--I want to have Teddy have both of us. All three of us,_ he added, before Draco could even think to question the numbers.  _All the Weasleys, for that matter. But if I have to make the choice between Andromeda and Teddy, then I know which one I'm choosing._  
  
Draco sent a current of emotion like a purr back at him, and saw Harry turn his head to the side, a flush patterning his cheeks. That was all right. Draco patted his back, and then watched Harry rise above the gate while he sat himself in the grass right before it. He cast a few spells as he did, spells that would make him more sensitive to glamours and other charms that Andromeda might use to conceal herself.  
  
And they waited.  
  
*  
  
It was afternoon, even slanting towards the long, blue-dusk twilight, before Andromeda showed herself. Harry had stopped paying attention to all the winds that circled back to him, because none of them had news, but then one of them bore a familiar murmur, and he snapped up, staring to the north.  
  
Andromeda appeared a moment later, slogging through the grass. She must have Apparated part of the way, Harry thought, or she would never have come so far so quickly. She carried a bag slung over one shoulder and Teddy in her arms, probably with a charm on him to lighten his weight.  
  
She was murmuring words of safety and peace and comfort to him. Teddy wasn't crying, but he kept twisting his head from side to side as though he expected to see someone else coming along behind him.  
  
 _Well, he would._ Harry pulled himself higher still, so he wouldn't be visible to a searching glance, and touched the bond. He could just make out Draco sitting up below, and nodding towards him.  
  
Together, they awaited the moment when Andromeda would look up and see Draco, but it didn't happen for a long time. Consumed in Teddy and the need to reach the gate, she staggered through the grass until she reached the bottom of the last small hill that blocked her from the gate's light. Then she looked up, and stared. Her lips parted in a little, gasping huff.  
  
Then she began to run, and Harry knew she  _must_ have lightened Teddy's weight. There was no way she could have managed that pace, at her age.  
  
Draco stood up and waited in front of the gate. He didn't stretch his arms out to block it or anything so obvious, but Andromeda couldn't have dodged past him to get inside the narrow stretches left open, either.  
  
She staggered to a stop, this time. She faced Draco in silence, and Harry only knew that Draco was tense from the privileged information of the bond; he looked almost relaxed as he stood there.  
  
"You can't prevent me from going through," Andromeda whispered. The winds carried the conversation to Harry as clearly as if he stood beside Draco, including the little hitch in her voice. "You don't have the  _right_."  
  
"I have a blood relation to Teddy," Draco said. "And I think you're being an idiot. You don't even know if he can go through the gate, but you're willing to risk it anyway? What kind of grandmother  _are_ you?"  
  
Andromeda flinched, but her voice was alive in a way that Harry hadn't heard her speak since the end of the war. "I'm someone who has seen my entire family killed, and I'm  _sick_ of sitting back and waiting for the day it happens to my grandson. Hurricane is more dangerous than Earth. If I go home, he'll live."  
  
"Because the wizarding world is so kind to the children of werewolves, and to people with wild magic," Draco murmured, shaking his head.  
  
"If I don't tell anyone about it, then how would anyone know?" Andromeda asked. "Harry made his wild magic visible. That doesn't mean Teddy's needs to be."  
  
"The Ministry has records of his birth," Draco said flatly. "And then there's his last name. I  _assure_ you, someone will make the connection with Remus Lupin and know this is his son, and fear him because of that."  
  
Andromeda nodded. "But there are still things I can do to protect him from that," she said, cradling Teddy against her chest. Harry watched Teddy stir again, blinking at Draco and then back along the path as though he expected to see Harry come that way. Andromeda didn't seem to notice. "And I can protect him more easily on Earth than on Hurricane."  
  
"Here, no one fears werewolves in the same way," Draco said, his voice so low that Harry didn't think he could have heard it without the winds. "He has the chance to grow up without being feared at  _all_. Why would you try to change that?"  
  
Andromeda shook her head. "I can't protect him here. I want to go home. He'll grow up more easily in a world with wands, in a world where there aren't huge predators that can kill him every time he turns around."  
  
Draco sighed patiently. "Because, of course, the wizarding world has no Dark wizards, or dragons."  
  
"It's not the same thing, and you know it." Andromeda's hands tightened around Teddy, and she took a deep breath. Harry touched the bond in Draco's mind again. He knew what Andromeda looked like when she was readying herself to do something. "He'll be safer in the wizarding world, guarded by more people. Those dangers might not ever happen to him. Here, he'll be killed."  
  
"How do you know?" Draco asked. "He's survived so far, and he has two of the most powerful wizards on Hurricane protecting him."  
  
Andromeda sneered at him. "You can't seriously imply that you don't understand the differences."  
  
"I don't," Draco said. "Especially when you agreed once that you should stay here, that Teddy needs  _all_ of us as part of his life, and now you're ignoring your own words and trying to leave."  
  
"I'm tired of arguments."  
  
Harry whipped the warning down into Draco's head an instant before Andromeda cast her spell, but that was still enough time. Draco raised his hands in front of him, growing those invisible claws, and they caught and chopped the blow. For a moment, Draco looked as though he would hurl something at Andromeda in return, and Harry prepared himself to charge down there. He had never meant the violence to get this far.  
  
"You can't do things like that," Draco said, his voice brittle. "Not when we've guarded your back, and you agreed to come here, and Teddy needs all of us."  
  
"Cousin Draco!" Teddy was leaning out of Andromeda's arms, and she seemed as if she would drop him. After a second, she juggled him back into position, but Teddy was kicking and squirming now, and didn't look as if he would stop anytime soon. "Cousin Draco! Cousin Draco! Cousin Draco!"  
  
Harry hovered down and into view. Things hadn't worked out the way he had wanted them to, and he didn't see the point in staying out of them now.  
  
Andromeda stared up at him, then down at Draco. "This was a trap." Her voice crackled. "You set it up."  
  
"We didn't know whether you would want to listen to reason," Draco said, his voice almost inaudible under Teddy's continuing cries. "Look, I agree with Harry that you should be able to go through the gate if you're that determined to make a fool of yourself. But you're not taking Teddy with you. He belongs here, and you didn't take care of him once before when you lived on Earth. You might do the same thing again."  
  
"He comes with me," Andromeda said.  
  
"He doesn't," Harry said, making his voice boom so that Andromeda wouldn't be able to ignore him. "I don't want to fight with you, Andromeda. I don't want Teddy to remember that nightmare for the rest of his life. But I will if I have to."  
  
Andromeda turned to the side and lifted her wand. Draco immediately moved to counter her.   
  
And Andromeda darted for the unguarded gate.


	25. Beyond the Gate

Harry slammed his winds down without thinking. The time had come to stop that, maybe. He had given Andromeda all the chances in the world to return of her own free will, and she’d taken none of them. He would have to show her that he meant what he said about not allowing her to take Teddy.  
  
His winds curled precisely around Teddy and lifted him out of her grasp. Teddy screamed for a moment, but Draco stepped forwards with his arms out, and Harry dropped him into them. Draco cradled him close, and Teddy sniffled and clung as though Draco was his one familiar figure in a changing world.  
  
Hell, maybe he was.  
  
Andromeda continued to run. Harry shook his head and stepped back. If she made her own decision, he would have to let her go. She was an adult, and although he thought returning to the wizarding world would be bad for her, it was her wishes that mattered.  
  
 _As long as we’re only talking about her._  
  
But Andromeda only made it a few steps into the white light beaming from the gate before she cried out and stumbled back, her hand over her eyes. The light glowing from the gate became bright enough that Harry raised his winds. Did the Ministry have Unspeakables or Aurors waiting on the other side? Harry intended to hit them hard with his power before they could establish a foothold on Hurricane, if so.  
  
But no one came through the gate, and as the breathless moments passed with no other sound than Draco murmuring to Teddy, the light faded again. Harry lowered his hands and the winds at the same time, and frowned at Andromeda, who had one hand clasped to her mouth, eyes fixed on the gate.  
  
“What happened?” Harry asked.  
  
“I don’t know,” Andromeda whispered. “It felt as though the air thickened around me, and then some enormous hand was forcing me back.” She didn’t take her eyes from the gate, though Harry didn’t know how she could see anything through the intense light. “I don’t know,” she repeated.  
  
 _I think I do,_ Draco said, and he laughed in Harry’s mind.  
  
He was the one who could laugh; Harry was the one who needed to comfort Andromeda, because he remembered the woman who had helped him raise Teddy and the woman who had struggled so hard to overcome her grief, before she gave into it and her fear. He put a hand on her arm. Andromeda turned blank eyes on him, ready to accept an answer as long as it was solid.  
  
“I think Hurricane kept you here,” Harry said. “We wondered whether Teddy would be able to go back through the gate with his wild magic, and what would happen if he did. Draco thought he might lose his magic on Earth. It seems that you won’t have to worry about that,” he added over Andromeda’s shoulder to Draco. “The gate simply won’t let us through once we’ve adapted to Hurricane.”  
  
“But I don’t have the wild magic,” Andromeda said, soft and dreary.  
  
“You must have,” Harry said. “Maybe an unrecognized talent, like the way that Teddy’s barely manifests if you don’t know what to look for. Or maybe only the potential for it. Maybe it waits until you want something really badly.” He thought of Ron and his intense desire to escape Bodiless and live free.  
  
Andromeda bowed her head. She said nothing, made no other sound, but Harry saw the gleam of tears sliding down her cheeks.  
  
“It’s not  _that_ bad,” Draco said. “Don’t you feel better, having the decision made for you? This way, you don’t have to challenge Harry, and lose.”  
  
Harry held Draco’s eyes for a moment, and said nothing down the bond. Draco turned away with Teddy, put him on the grass, and answered his questions about breakfast so that Harry didn’t have to. Harry turned back to Andromeda.  
  
The last two years rang in his memory. He had been impatient with her often, had considered her weak when she made so little effort to emerge from her grief and realize that she was alive even if Tonks and Ted and Remus weren’t. But then, she had only done what he had permitted her to. If he hadn’t taken over so thoroughly, convinced he was the only one who could care for Teddy, then maybe she would have had to step up instead of drift along half-immersed in grief and half in dreams.  
  
“I can forgive you,” Harry told her quietly. “Because Teddy needs his grandmother, and you’re still that. But if you want to go back home, if you’re going to try to do something stupid again, something that might hurt him, then I won’t.”  
  
Andromeda raised her head. The tears had gone, and she looked shakier than Harry had ever seen her before, but the emotion in her eyes wasn’t fear.  
  
“I wanted to go back home,” she said. “I still think it would be safer for Teddy in the wizarding world than here. No giant birds trying to kill him, no wild magic eating him alive.”  
  
“It might be safer for him if anyone else loved him,” Harry corrected her. “But as long as I do, then there are people who will see him as the Chosen One’s adopted son, and try to gain some sort of political advantage by killing him.”  
  
Andromeda bowed her head again and took a deep breath. Harry hoped it was cleansing. He ached all over, and not from physical weariness. He wanted this to work out between them, he did, he just wasn’t sure it could.  
  
“Fine,” Andromeda whispered. “Since we can’t go through the gate, and you and my nephew have taken over the task of guarding us, then I’ll help. But I don’t  _like_ it, and don’t expect me to embrace the wild magic that you claim kept me here. When it comes, I won’t use it. I’ll ignore it. And I’m only doing this for Teddy.”  
  
Harry smiled at her despite himself. “That’s fine. He was the main reason I came here.”  
  
Andromeda looked up so quickly that Harry thought she must have hurt her neck. “Not long ago, you would have said that he was the  _only_  reason you came here. What has changed?”  
  
Harry held her eyes and tried to be as honest as he could. “The bond with Draco, and the development of my wild magic. And seeing that Teddy has you and Draco, now, in ways he didn’t back in the wizarding world. I still love him and want to protect him, but he isn’t the only center of my life anymore.”  
  
Andromeda shook her head. “That means he’s not as well-protected. You should concentrate on him more.”  
  
Harry winced, because in a way she was right. He  _had_ been thinking a lot about the journeys to the ocean and north lately, about Ron and Hermione and the wild magic, and not about Teddy.  
  
 _You can’t think about someone every moment of his life. If you could, then I would require you to think about me instead,_ Draco’s voice said in the back of his mind, disagreeable in its calmness.  _It’s probably better that you’re thinking about general things. You’ll nourish the community in which Teddy grows, as Granger would put it._  
  
Harry smiled and reached out a hand to Andromeda. “I’ll protect him as much as I can, but that means protecting other people, too. Including you.”  
  
Andromeda briefly pressed her hand to her belly, then took it away again with a deep breath. “I don’t know how to live again.”  
  
“Then we’ll help you learn,” Harry said. “I don’t think I’m any sort of expert on grief, since I overcame it kind of accidentally. The bond with Draco helped the most, and I didn’t ask for that. But Draco can tell you more than I can. He gave up all his money and property to come here.”  
  
“And you didn’t?” Draco said, although his voice was so gently shaded that Andromeda might not notice.  
  
“I think it meant more to you than it did to me,” Harry said, and smiled at him. “At least, I’m pretty sure it did.”  
  
Draco grunted something about how Harry shouldn’t get so cocky just because he was right sometimes. Harry hid his snicker as best he could and turned back to Andromeda. “I told you before that Teddy needs all three of us,” he said. “It’s why I would have come after you if you’d managed to pass through the gate. You can make your own choices, but Teddy’s a child, and the only thing he would have known is that he’d suddenly left me and Draco behind, not why we didn’t follow. Do you understand now?”  
  
“He’s still my grandson,” Andromeda said, in a small, choked voice. “The Ministry granted custody to me.”  
  
Harry nodded. “But the Ministry’s decisions mean nothing here, and I told you what his life would have been like if we’d stayed there. Even if I never came back, the Ministry knew I was helping you take care of him. They might have taken him to use as a political pawn. The Chosen One’s godson. They would know how to use him.”  
  
Andromeda’s brow furrowed. “Why do you know how they think so well, if you despise them?”  
  
“Because it’s the sort of thing I had to know, to survive,” Harry said shortly. He could understand the tack she was taking, but it was still annoying. “Here, we don’t need to know that. Here, Teddy has the chance to grow up free of the Ministry’s politics. Not  _all_ politics, but at least that particular poisonous kind. Can you see why I was so willing to take the risk to free him?”  
  
Andromeda watched him with wide eyes. Then she nodded. “Now I do.”  
  
And she did, Harry thought, watching her. Or at least he thought she did. All the struggle to make her understand, all the suspicions, all the grief, and it seemed that what he’d needed was the right combination of mentioning how the politics would hurt Teddy and that things could be different here.  
  
 _She feared the Ministry more than she feared me. And she might even be more afraid of them than she is of the wild magic, although I think she’d deny that.  
  
Of course she would deny that, _Draco said in his mind, as impatient as a wave.  _Why would you think otherwise? All she’s done since you started confronting her is throw up more and more denial. If you hadn’t guessed where she was going and got us here before her, then she’d probably still be running into the gate trying to get through, and not understanding why she couldn’t.  
  
I don’t think so. Maybe the gate being closed to her spared her from having to make some hard choices, but it forced her into others. And I think she needs our understanding now a lot more than she needs our scolding._  
  
Draco bent his head over Teddy and said nothing. He didn’t need to, when his conviction that Harry should be the one to deal with Andromeda and her shit was coming over loud and clear.  
  
“Stay here with us,” Harry urged Andromeda quietly. “Help us. You don’t have to use the wild magic if you don’t want to, but help us in other ways. Make this a fit world for Teddy to grow up in, if it isn’t now. We can’t do that without you.”  
  
Andromeda’s eyes had tears in them again, but for once, Harry didn’t fear that she would break into a wild outburst against him. She nodded. “I think I can do that,” she said. “If you help me.”  
  
 _Of course you’ll help her, you help everyone._  
  
Harry took Andromeda’s hand and smiled. “I can.”  _And you help people who are related to you by blood or bonded to you, so don’t be such a hypocrite._  
  
*  
  
Draco would have liked to point out that that meant a much smaller pool of people for him to help than for Harry, but Harry was being a hypocrite and Draco didn’t want to say it. Therefore, he turned his head away with a small sniff and paid attention to Teddy, who had started tugging on his arm a few minutes ago.  
  
“Cousin Draco,” Teddy said, and held up a pinch of grass-fluff that he must have taken from one of the smaller grass blades around them. “Look at this.” He waved the fluff back and forth, and small spikes of white stuck out from it and pointed here and there in the air.  
  
Harry laughed in his mind. Draco struggled to work his lips into the semblance of an interested smile, and not turn around to look at Andromeda and Harry again. “That’s fun, Teddy,” he said, and scooped his little cousin up. “But don’t you think that we should go back home and have breakfast?”  
  
“Eat,” Teddy said, nodding, and then paused and thought about it, before saying, loudly enough to make Draco jump a bit, “ _Eat!_ ”  
  
 _Wonderful,_ Draco thought, and Harry smirked—it didn’t matter that Draco wasn’t facing him, he could still tell well enough when the bastard was smirking—and whipped a quick observation into the back of his mind.  
  
 _Are you still so eager for children of our own, when something like this is the result?_  
  
Draco grimaced, and said nothing. He didn’t think Harry was being fair to the notion of children of their own, but pressing him on the subject would do no good. Draco held Teddy up and shook him back and forth, and Teddy abandoned his bit of fluff to hold onto Draco’s arms and giggle. “Do you want to go home?” Draco asked, keeping one eye on Andromeda as she stood watching them. “Back to the camp with the hills and the stream and the house where you live with your grandmother?”  
  
“Uncle Harry’s house,” Teddy said, and stuck a finger into the corner of his mouth.  
  
Andromeda said nothing, but Draco could see her mouth firm. Well, he had to admit that he had called the camp home partially to bother her and see what her reaction would be. If she reacted badly, that was only to be expected, and from the trickle of disapproval he was getting from Harry, Draco should only be glad that she wasn’t crying or saying something about her daughter and husband.  
  
 _I’m glad that I didn’t know Cousin Dora,_ Draco added to Harry in his head.  _It would mean that she would try to talk to me about her grief, too, and that would be tiresome.  
  
You missed something by not knowing Tonks, _Harry responded, sharp enough to make Draco wince, and his winds almost ripped Draco from his feet as they began the flight back to the camp. Still, the pull gentled in a second, although that might have been more because of Teddy than Draco himself, and Draco trusted he had made his point.   
  
 _I’m not a nice person,_ he told Harry as gently as he could, while they soared back over the fields and streams in the direction of the camp. They were seeing much more water now, probably because they had learned how to look for it. It didn’t reflect the sky of Hurricane in the same way as the water on Earth reflected the sky there, because the colors were different.  _You must have seen that by now.  
  
There’s a difference between not being a nice person in general and being glad that you didn’t know Teddy’s mum. She was wonderful.  
  
Tell me how? _Draco made his voice as gentle as he could, as soft, as wistful. Harry wouldn’t be fooled completely, but he could feel that Draco wished to propitiate him, and that was something, at least.  _I would ask Aunt Andromeda to tell me, but I_ know  _she would make her sound like a goddess, and I’m not interested in knowing goddesses._  
  
Harry said nothing, only gave him a single long look over his shoulder. Draco held Teddy close, watched the way that Andromeda shut her eyes and gripped her hands around the arms of the invisible chair of wind carrying her, and waited.  
  
 _Well, maybe I’ll tell you, if only so that you can also tell Teddy stories of his parents when he grows up,_ Harry said grudgingly.  
  
 _Yes, think of it like that,_ Draco said.  _And just think, all the practice I’ll get in storytelling, I’ll be a much better storyteller when we have our own children and they need someone to murmur to them just before they go to sleep.  
  
The image of you murmuring to _anyone  _just before they go to sleep…_  
  
Draco laughed at the emotions washing down the bond to him, spotted and glowing silvery-grey with all the things Harry felt, and Teddy looked up curiously at Draco from his position right next to Draco’s chest.  _Yes, it’s strange, isn’t it? But you’re the only one who can help me become a nicer person, Harry.  
  
Because I’m the only one who takes on so many hopeless causes?  
  
No, because you’re the only one I would be able to make any change like that for._  
  
Harry was silent. Draco waited, listening to Teddy’s chatter, and nodding when he couldn’t hear it because of the wind. Sometimes, thanks to the bond connecting him to Harry, he forgot how inconvenient the wind billowing all around them really was. He couldn’t talk to anyone  _but_ Harry.  
  
 _When we were traveling with Ron and Hermione, you probably would have put that among the advantages of the wind, and not the disadvantages._  
  
Draco tilted his head in recognition, but said,  _What do you think about what I said, Harry? Will you tell me about Cousin Dora? I’ll call her Tonks when I talk about her to Teddy, but I prefer to talk about her this way to you,_ he added, because he could feel the bond between them quivering with the onrushing question.   
  
 _This isn’t—some kind of bargain,_ Harry said, with more moments, and more momentum, and more wind passing them in the air and more ground streaming past beneath them.  _That I tell you about Tonks and you tell Teddy, and then I agree to have children with that ritual the mummidade used. You don’t even know that you’re going to want children with me in five years._  
  
Draco smiled, and said nothing. No, it wasn’t a bargain. But because of the way they were connected, Harry already knew that.  
  
Harry sighed, and then his voice warmed.  _She was a member of the Order of the Phoenix, you know,_ he said, and Draco stifled his temptation to make fun of dotty old men and what they chose to call their supposedly secret evil-fighting Orders. Harry’s voice became a little stiffer, but at least he didn’t say something stupid.  _She was a Metamorphmagus, like Teddy. And she was clumsy. She managed to pass all the tests and become an Auror despite that. Can you imagine how good she must have been at the things she was good at?  
  
At least as good as you are at circular statements._  
  
Harry didn’t answer for a few seconds, and Draco had time to regret what he had said—well, not saying it, but that Harry had taken it the wrong way—before Harry continued,  _She was in love with Remus. That really surprised me. I mean, I didn’t see why, and I don’t know exactly when or why it started.  
  
You were a teenager, Harry. You couldn’t be expected to pay attention to every pair of random adults that crossed your path._  
  
Harry twisted around to look at him, rocking himself backwards on the wind. Draco could just imagine the expression on Andromeda’s face when he did that. Maybe she preferred, at least at the moment, that Draco be the one to carry Teddy, after all.  _Why are you so inclined to make excuses for me?  
  
Was it an excuse? I wasn’t aware you needed one._  
  
Harry flipped himself upside down while he thought. Draco had to admit that even  _he_ found that unnerving to watch. He had to occupy himself with Teddy for a while instead, although Teddy had gone to sleep and wasn’t very interesting to watch at the moment.   
  
Then Harry said,  _Maybe I don’t. I feel like I should have paid more attention to Remus and Tonks and known more about them because they left Teddy to my care. They knew about_ me,  _they thought_ I  _was important enough to take care of their son, but I don’t know as much about them as I should.  
  
You take guilt on too easily, _Draco said.  _But if you’re reconsidering now, that’s good. I’m all for seeing you forgive yourself.  
  
I know you are, _Harry said, and passed on before Draco could ask him about the dry taste to his voice.  _Anyway. Tonks’s Patronus was a wolf. It changed to match Remus’s werewolf form. And she liked to turn her hair purple to tease people. That’s something I can tell Teddy, something simple he might like about her. She loved to make people laugh. She had a great sense of humor. I thought she would get upset because she was always tripping over things and people would laugh at her, but maybe that’s why she could accept it in the first place. After a while, I always laughed with her, never at her._  
  
Personally, Draco thought she sounded boring, but he listened quietly to Harry’s reminiscences about Tonks, which passed quickly into reminiscences of Remus, and from there to moments from Teddy’s life when he was younger. Draco listened to all of it. Except for the parts about Teddy, he wasn’t listening for the people actually involved, though, and he wondered if Harry knew that.  
  
 _I know that. But thanks._  
  
*  
  
When they landed back in the camp, Harry set Andromeda down a little way apart, after everyone else had seen her but before they could come close enough to question her. He thought she might need some time to get herself together and decide on the best story to present.  
  
But Andromeda cried out in such a strange voice that Harry immediately turned back, landing in the grass beside her. He wondered if he’d hurt her with a rough landing, and opened his mouth to apologize.  
  
Andromeda, though, was staring at her hands, and not at her feet, the most logical part of her body to be injured in a fall. Harry backed around to the side.  
  
Her hands were glowing with a soft, silvery light, and as Harry watched, twining strands of light rose into the air and washed back and forth, as gently as seaweed growing underwater. The touch of the power, sweet on Harry’s face, told Harry what he’d guessed already: this was Andromeda’s manifestation of the wild magic.  
  
It seemed to do nothing for long moments, and Harry wondered if Andromeda didn’t know what she wanted most, or if she wanted several conflicting things. Then it arched down and into the earth, winding and burrowing.   
  
Andromeda yanked her hand back.  
  
The silver light slid over her wrist and remained locked in place, buried. Then it began to solidify, to twine, to grow, and a silver dome rose where the light had been. Harry reached out and found it warm and sturdy, at least as much so as the earth houses they’d been building.  
  
Then the dome rose higher, and dived deeper, and yes, that was what it was, a house with wider windows than the little house Harry and Andromeda and Teddy had been sharing, and a welcoming door hung with what looked like a silver curtain. Harry reached out to it with his winds, and they stopped dead at the door.  
  
He turned back to Andromeda. She was staring at him, and she whispered, “I wanted—I wanted a private place. I was thinking of that, a place where no one could follow me, where I could just  _escape_.”  
  
And she sat down and put her face in her hands.


	26. The Inevitable

“What if she doesn’t come out of the house again?”  
  
That was Hermione’s voice, and while Harry could understand her concern, because she had been one of the people who tried to help Andromeda out of her grief when they were still living in the wizarding world, now he rolled his eyes and bent over to pick up the ball Teddy had tossed at him. “She will. She can’t stand to be without other people. If she could, I would be less concerned for her. And she’ll want to come out and complain about the wild magic, in the end.”  
  
“I suppose that’s true,” said Hermione, in the tone that meant she didn’t think it at all.  
  
Harry sat up, stretched, and then looked back at Hermione as Teddy shrieked with laughter at the ball almost hitting him. “What else can we do? She went into the house and won’t come out, and her magic protects her by walling up all the entrances whenever we try. She said that she didn’t want the magic, that she wouldn’t use it, but she’s using it right now. I don’t want to destroy her confidence, or the chance that she might actually come to be okay with the magic in the future, and we will if we force her.”  
  
Hermione nibbled her lip a few times, then nodded. “But isn’t Teddy going to ask where she is?”  
  
Harry had to smile. “I just told him she was in the bathroom. That made him stop asking. You know how much he hates baths.”  
  
“I thought children would forget things like that if they didn’t have constant reminders.” Hermione blinked and looked around as though there would be an unknown bathroom over to the side.  
  
“Teddy doesn’t forget something that he hates as much as he hates baths,” Harry said fervently. He was lucky Teddy liked the water that ran down from the hills so much that he didn’t associate it with a bath when Harry collected some and dunked him in it. “No, Hermione, he’ll be all right. And I think she’ll come out if he asks for her. She was willing to go back to the wizarding world to raise him when she thought that Hurricane wasn’t safe for him.”  
  
“That sounds selfish to me, not brave.” Hermione folded her arms and tapped her foot against the grass, which was getting flattened down between the little hills with as many people as walked over it in a day.   
  
“It was,” Harry said. “But also brave, the way she thought about it. Can you imagine setting out into the plains, with no idea of where to go at first, and just wandering, looking for it? I think her wild magic guided her. It seems focused on safety, and she would have focused on the gate as an idea of safety. But it was still brave, and she did do it for Teddy’s sake. If she hadn’t, she would have just left him here when she ran.”  
  
“Your attempts to excuse her aren’t going to do her any good.”  
  
 _Draco_ , Harry acknowledged with a little pulse of his mind. He had known Draco was coming up on his left side, just as he knew that Draco had spoken those words aloud because he wanted Hermione to hear them.  
  
“That’s right,” Hermione said, smiling at Draco without seeming to consider the implications of having him as an ally. “Harry already spoiled her and didn’t make her work enough when we were back on Earth. What is he going to do here if she won’t do anything because Harry does it all for her?”  
  
“That’s not how it was,” Harry said, and he thought it wasn’t his voice that made them stare as much as the fact that a wind was whipping past his head and making his hair lash his cheeks. With an effort, Harry forced his voice back under control and smiled pleasantly. “That’s not at all how it was,” he repeated. “I wished she would help me more with Teddy, and sometimes I made her do that. But I knew about her grief, and I was the one who chose to take care of Teddy with her despite that. The Ministry would have granted me sole custody if I’d fought for it. I didn’t want it.”  
  
“Uncle Harry!”  
  
Teddy, bored of playing with the ball by himself, rushed back into the center of the conversation, dancing around Harry and lifting his arms to be picked up. Harry scooped him close and stood up, holding him while he glared at Draco and Hermione over Teddy’s head.  
  
“We’ll go play,” Teddy said, something Harry said a lot, and then tugged on Harry’s arm and pointed towards the stream that came down from the hills.  
  
“In a minute,” Harry said, and bounced him while he said quietly, “I know Andromeda’s caused a lot of trouble, and I don’t know if she’ll stop causing trouble. But we need to give her a  _chance_. Hauling her out of her house early is asking for more trouble. Either we let her fit in on Hurricane, or we watch her deteriorate and probably do something else that might hurt her or other people.”  
  
 _Harry_ , Draco said, in a link that had a dancing rainbow of uncertain colors around it.  
  
 _Not right now,_ Harry said, and walked towards the stream as Teddy tugged on his arm again. Right now, he thought, he could do with giving Teddy a not-bath and watching him catch the little transparent creatures that only his eyes could see. He understood Draco and Hermione, but he also understood Andromeda, and things were so  _messy_.  
  
But they wouldn’t become less complicated if people harassed Andromeda and denied her the chance to fit in with the rest of the camp.  
  
“Uncle Harry, down!” Teddy said, and wriggled. Harry put him down, and he raced ahead, falling now and then. Unless he fell on a hard floor, though, he never seemed to hurt himself, and there were no hard floors in Hurricane.  
  
Harry felt Draco’s mind brush against his again, but while they could never be truly separate now, Harry could refuse to speak to him. He kept walking, giving himself time to come down from his anger, and Draco time to think.  
  
 _No one’s wrong in this, and we’re all wrong, and everyone has a point, and I just don’t want to think about it now._  
  
*  
  
Draco turned back to Granger when he was done with his second attempt to reach Harry, and saw her frowning at Andromeda’s little silver house. It hadn’t changed since she went into it, after perhaps an hour of blankly staring at what her magic had wrought. Draco knew already that his claws couldn’t cut it, Harry’s winds couldn’t budge it—not that Harry had tried to do that, but it didn’t tremble when the winds blew near it—and that Weasley’s magic-reducing ability had no effect.  
  
Among the most disturbing things about this was that Draco didn’t like the idea of Andromeda being stronger than any of the rest of them. He had accepted that he might not match Harry’s strength, and that was all right; he was still bonded to the most powerful defender of the camp. But for Andromeda to have a place where she could retreat from consequences…  
  
“I wish she would come out.”  
  
Draco nodded to Granger. “I don’t know if anyone’s tried calling to her through the places the windows used to be.” The windows had sealed themselves along with every other opening when Andromeda had entered the house. “Could she hear us, do you think?”  
  
Granger studied the featureless silver dome for long minutes, then sighed and shook her head. “Probably not. And it would only make Harry angry if we pounded on it or shook it. Not that that does any good.”  
  
“You’ve tried?” Draco blinked. He wouldn’t have wanted to cross Harry and try it, so it seemed incredible that Granger had.  
  
Granger tilted her head at him. “Of course. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t going to suffocate or starve inside a dome without any windows. It doesn’t budge, and I think it would dissipate if she died, so I have to accept that she’s all right for now.”  
  
Draco nodded. “Why is Harry so intent on defending her? He’s suffered more from the way she behaves than anyone has.”  
  
Granger sighed and touched her hair, but lowered her hand instead of running it through the thick frizz.  _Talking of things that wouldn’t do any good,_ Draco thought. “Why does Harry forgive anyone? Why did he go to die when he could have done something else? Why was he able to forgive Dumbledore for manipulating him? It’s just the way he is, and while some of it  _has_ to do with his life, I don’t know where the rest comes from.”  
  
“His life?” Draco said.  
  
Granger looked at him so sharply that Draco made wide and innocent eyes at her without even thinking about it. Granger turned away and went back to studying Andromeda’s house. “I mean, the way he was constantly at war, and the way he bounced back from that.”  
  
Draco laughed, a little harshly, thinking about the turmoil that still sometimes appeared in Harry’s mind, and how he had tortured Rasatis—not that these good people knew anything about that, but still. “He isn’t as good as you think. He’s not completely recovered from the war.”  
  
“He still did it faster than anyone else I know.”  
  
“Including you?”  
  
Granger glanced at Draco, her face neutral. “You’re not going to make any friends by overvaluing Harry and putting his friends down, you know. Not even Harry. He’s made it clear that we’re going to be a part of his life for the  _rest_ of his life.”  
  
Draco raised gently protesting hands, even as he thought that Granger had no idea about some of the thoughts streaming through Harry’s head regarding her and Weasley. “I know. I simply wondered. You and Weasley seem to have recovered well from the end of the war. Maybe not the werewolf, but the others, too. My aunt is the only one who seems to have that much trauma. Why do you think Harry did better than you?”  
  
Granger stared unseeing at the side of the silver dome, and the lace-edged shape of one of the closed windows. Draco waited. He knew the signs when someone was thinking, and despite what Harry and Granger both seemed to think, he knew how to wait for what he wanted.  
  
“Because he had more to overcome than we did,” Granger said at last. “Almost dying. Realizing that Dumbledore had set him up to die, and that he would have been satisfied with Harry’s death if it meant that Voldemort died, too.” She seemed to ignore Draco’s flinch, or at least not notice it. There was little active malice in Granger, Draco thought, compared to other people he’d met. She was more likely to open a wound through thoughtlessness. “All those fights, against the basilisk and Quirrell and the past. His relatives.”  
  
“Tell me more about them,” Draco said, settling down on the grass and putting his hands on his knees. It wasn’t like they had much else to do right now, when Andromeda still wouldn’t come out of her house.  
  
But perhaps because he’d sat down, he got a sharp glance from Granger instead of the rambling monologue he’d wanted. “I don’t think it’s my place to say anything about that if Harry hasn’t,” she said at last.  
  
“I can find out most of what I want by reaching through the bond,” Draco pointed out. “I only wanted to know how you saw it, and what happened to him that he might not have noticed. You’d be more likely to notice things from the outside.”  
  
“So you want even more things that he would prefer we not reveal,” Granger said dryly. “No, thanks.” She studied Andromeda’s house one more time, and then sighed. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do here. We might as well get back to weeding the greenhouses, and I think Ginny was hoping to take her bird up this afternoon for a hunt. It’s growing fast enough that it should be able to kill one of the rabbits at least…”  
  
Draco let her chatter wash over him, and didn’t move when she left to go to the greenhouses. He remained still instead, and reached out through the bond to Harry, still at the stream with Teddy.  
  
 _Do you want to tell me more about why we should forgive Andromeda when she comes out?  
  
Not really, _Harry answered, calm and cheerful.  _Do you want to come and help me some more with The Bath That Must Not Speak Its Name?_  
  
Draco made the bond between them pink and pearly and soft.  _You know that you can tell me anything you want, including more information about my Cousin Dora.  
  
I might enjoy that. _  
  
And wouldn’t enjoy talking about himself, was the clear implication. Well, Draco had always known that he was bonded to someone who wasn’t perfectly forthcoming. He stood up and went to join Harry and Teddy at the pool, just as Teddy splashed water into Harry’s eyes. Harry blinked and spluttered and took off his glasses to clean them. Draco rested a hand on his shoulder and leaned over to cast a Cleaning Charm on Teddy’s hair. He laughed and said, “Tickles!”  
  
“That’s one reaction that some people have to that charm,” Draco said, wiser than to call the charm by its proper name with Harry looking at him from the corner of his eye. “Do you want to use a wand when you’re grown up?”  
  
Teddy considered him, and then Harry, hooking a finger into the corner of his mouth. “Uncle Harry no wand,” he said, and frowned over the sentence as though he knew what was missing but not how to say it better.  
  
“You may need one,” Draco said, and kissed his cousin’s forehead. Then he sat down beside the stream to enjoy the rest of the not-a-bath and wait for the moment when Andromeda would come out of her house.  
  
*  
 _  
_As it happened, they met the mummidade coming into the camp and had to speak with them before Andromeda came out.  
  
Harry looked up from the pool and found a new trio awaiting them beside the water. They had come close so quietly that he hadn’t noticed them, and neither had the guards on the hills, Charlie and Arthur, who turned around with red faces. Harry waved his hand to hold them back, and reached out to clasp Draco’s hand. The bond flowed over them, through them, sealing them together.  
  
The trio reached out to them with a vision of grass-blades heavy with golden seed, a wild wind stirring them. Goldensway, Harry decided was the best equivalent, and heard Draco echo it a moment later.  
  
The mummidade filled their heads with images of birds so thick that Harry flinched despite himself and looked upwards. It didn’t help to see the wings of Ginny’s bird wheeling there, although it was still small enough not to cast the kind of shadow that Goldensway insisted was true in their memories.  
  
The images of birds slaughtering the mummid one by one appeared again and again. Harry understood  _that_ message well enough. They wanted to know what had happened when Harry and Draco went north.  
  
Draco grinned down the bond. Harry grunted. Yes, he supposed Draco  _would_ find it fun to spin out the story like this, and stun the mummidade with images of what  _they_ had undergone for once. Harry only found it tiring.  
  
So he paid more attention to Teddy, and let Draco be the one to give the images of the beasts and their riders, of Bodiless—or as close to images as something like that could come, at least—and the wild magic that had manifested for Hermione and Ron, and the silver ovals, and the way their bond had saved them from Bodiless. Goldensway stood and listened, their heads turned so that their horns rested on each other’s.  
  
When Draco reached the end of the stream of images, Goldensway turned and stared at Harry. Teddy squirmed in his arms, and Harry put him back in the water as he repeated some of the images Draco had sent in abbreviated form, his confirmation that what Draco had experienced in the north was real.  
  
 _Not even the mummidade want to trust a Death Eater speaking on his own._  
  
Harry rolled his eyes and said nothing. The bond exchanged their emotions faster than any words they could have said, down the bond or otherwise, and Draco laughed at him, and Harry pushed at him, and the past twined with the present, and was still fragmenting when Goldensway sent their own next picture.  
  
This one showed a great dell, a small valley that Harry was surprised to think they’d never seen, because by the color of the grass it wasn’t very far from the camp. Then again, grass coated the sides and the hills around it, and they wouldn’t see it from the air. And how often did they venture onto the plains any other way?  
  
In the dell, mummidade waited, scraping their hooves or touching their horns or conversing in groups that splintered into modest pairs and trios and quartets as Harry watched. He understood the invitation issued to them.  
  
He still hesitated, wondering what would happen if they were out of the camp when Andromeda finally came out. But Draco flung back the scornful image of Hermione standing with her arms folded between Andromeda and the rest of the camp, and Harry had to smile as he acknowledged the reality of  _that_.  
  
“Then we should go and meet them,” Harry said aloud, just so they could have something between them that the mummidade didn’t share.  
  
Draco nodded slightly. “We’ll have to have someone take care of Teddy.”  
  
“Go  _with_ you,” Teddy said in an unexpectedly strong voice, and turned around to clutch at Harry’s legs. Harry sighed. There were advantages to talking silently after all, then.  
  
“You can’t go with us this time, Teddy.” Draco knelt down and met his eyes. “It’s like the time that we went away before. We have to go and do something important, and you aren’t big enough yet.”  
  
Harry held still. He didn’t have much hope that Draco would break through to Teddy that way, since Teddy had always rejected appeals to reason before, but he had at least thought to try, and maybe being treated like an adult by his cousin would make an impression on him.  
  
Teddy stuck his thumb in between his lips and blinked at Draco. “Not big enough,” he said, and there was a question in there if you were listening for it. Harry opened his mouth to tell Draco so.  
  
Draco was listening, though, and he smiled and nodded. “That’s right. When you’re big enough, then you can come with us.”  
  
Teddy looked up at Harry and held up a hand as high as he could go, which was about the bottom of Harry’s chest. “When I’m this big,” he said, and Harry checked his laughter and nodded.  _You’re wonderful with him,_ he told Draco while he stooped down and picked up Teddy, swinging him around once.  
  
 _That means I could be wonderful with other children, too._  
  
Harry snorted, but didn’t disparage the idea the way he had before. It was too much work, and perhaps what Draco said was true. Harry just wasn’t prepared to think about it yet.  
  
So they found Ron and asked him to watch Teddy, and explained they were about to go to the mummidade and detail the situation with the riders and Bodiless in the north. Ron blinked a few times along the way, but nodded and took Teddy’s hand when Teddy held it trustingly out to him.  
  
“Too much for me, mate,” he told Harry. “I’m just getting used to having wild magic of my own.”  
  
Harry punched him in the shoulder. “You were as valuable with us on that trip as anyone else, you know. I wish you wouldn’t put yourself down and act like you’re stupid when you understand things as well as anyone.”  
  
Ron turned a little pink. “Well, I know how to keep Teddy entertained, you can say that,” he said, and scooped Teddy up in his arms. “Why don’t we go watch your Aunt Hermione pulling up some weeds?”  
  
Teddy laughed, though it was probably more at the sound of the word “weeds” than anything else. Harry smiled as he watched them go, and then turned towards Draco and added,  _Someone else is wonderful with children, too._  
  
Not as wonderful as me.  
  
Harry was smiling as he called up the winds to lift him and Draco so they could follow Goldensway to this hidden dell. The mummidade were serious enough that this meeting might turn out to be a hard thing for all of them, but he had his bondmate at his side, and that made it hard to frown for long.


	27. The Hidden Valley

Draco looked critically around the valley as they landed in it—the place Goldensway had gone to such pains to tell them about. It didn’t look like anything more impressive than the hills of the camp had when they first decided to live there. There were gentle slopes here, and high grass, and a small pond of water flashing at the sky in one corner. Draco shook his head.  
  
 _Why is this an important place to them?_ he asked Harry as Harry landed beside him.  
  
 _That’s a question you might want to ask the mummidade,_ Harry said, calm and soft as snowfall, and then turned. Goldensway had already broken through the grass at the top of the dell, and trotted all three of its bodies down until it stood before them, solid as boulders. Sometimes, when you saw mummidade standing still, Draco thought, you had had a hard time picturing them moving at all.  
  
Harry reached out his hand. Draco knew what he wanted, but grimaced a little as he clasped Harry’s wrist. They had more important things to do than play liaison to the mummidade.  
  
 _Like what? Bathe Teddy? Wait for Andromeda to stop being a recluse?  
  
The first part is more important, if we’re ever going to have our own children, _Draco retorted.  _I should have some experience, don’t you think?  
  
And the mummidade are the only ones who can tell us how to conduct the ritual that would allow us to actually have children. We don’t even know if it would be possible for two humans to dance in the way they do, or call on the same magic._  
  
Draco scowled, but stayed quiet. He though his and Harry’s bond would grant them all the connections they needed, but he had to admit that it might be just as well not to annoy the mummidade. So he sent to Goldensway the picture of some grass dancing in a gentle breeze, and waited for them to answer.  
  
The three of them leaned their heads together in response. For long seconds, no solid image came to Harry and Draco, only shifting colors—golden, white, blue, grey—as though the mummidade needed to sort through the shades of Hurricane to find something capable of representing their thoughts.  
  
Then the image became clear, darkening to black and grey without restraint. It became the four-legged beasts that the riders had bonded with, and Goldensway easily imagined the winds that had borne them up. Draco nodded without understanding.  
  
Goldensway repeated the image of the riders, more insistently this time, or at least with more of them in the picture, which Draco could only interpret as insistence. Draco shook his head, then remembered the mummidade wouldn’t understand that signal, and in fact probably couldn’t pick up on human emotions through the wild magic, either.  
  
Instead, he consulted with Harry for a moment, flickers of image and feeling too fast to be called thought, and together they sent an image of a human wandering through the tall grass, tilting his head back to gape at the sky overhead. It was the closest they could come to _What are you talking about?_  
  
One more time Goldensway repeated the image of the riders, and then they paused and consulted their imaginations again. This time, though, they sent an entirely new picture the second Draco resigned himself to another long wait.  
  
Dead riders lay on the ground, the wings of their beasts broken around them. Goldensway hedged the image around with swirls of green and gold, which Draco knew was uncertainty. Most of the time, he thought, the mummidade used real pictures of things they had seen and experienced. They became more hesitant when they had to imagine something.  
  
 _Why do you want the riders dead?_ Harry snapped, but realized his mistake even before Draco could pluck the bond between them. Draco heard the hiss of his breath, and then he reached down the bond to Draco for assistance in painting their image.  
  
In the end, it was easiest just to send back the dead riders, and surround them with the same swirls of gold and green that Goldensway had used when they wanted to talk about something strange.  
  
This time, though, the response was much quicker. Once they had formed the image, Draco had to admit, the mummidade could be fast. They lofted the dead riders up and down, one minute lying on the ground, the next soaring into the sky with their wings intact. And when they lay on the ground, then mummidade walked among them in safety, but when they were aloft, mummidade ran away.  
  
Harry, without really consulting Draco, came up with two paired pictures, their memory of the riders and the mummidade’s memory of the birds hunting them as they ran wildly across the plains. Then he held them out and drew a long blue slash between them.  
  
Draco nodded. It  _did_ seem to him that the mummidade had confused the riders’ beasts with the birds, or at least thought both of them as enemies because they were predators that could fly.   
  
Goldensway retreated a physical step, then stamped all three of their left forehooves. Again they sent the mummidade walking calmly among the dead riders.   
  
This time, Harry responded with his own memory of hurling the riders about the sky with wind, and then the image of himself on the ground, facing Granger and Draco with bowed head.  
  
 _You never looked like that,_ Draco told him.  
  
 _That’s the way I felt._  
  
Before Draco could argue further, Goldensway snapped back with an image of Harry hurling the riders to the ground and leaving them there. And once again, peaceful mummidade. This time, they followed it up with dead birds, as though Harry and Draco were a bit thick and needed the help.  
  
 _Compared to them, we are a bit thick on this method of communication,_ Draco admitted, and felt Harry accede to him while at the same time pushing thick stands of clumped grass at Goldensway. He wasn’t about to give in and kill the riders with his winds simply because they wanted him to.  
  
Goldensway came a step closer to them. Once again, they stared. Draco waited for more pictures, but none came.  
  
Instead, Goldensway clicked their horns together again and then reared up in what looked like an effortless move, the grace of which might have surprised Draco before he had seen them dance on the shore. They touched their forehooves together in the middle of the space their bodies formed, and seemed to freeze, presenting a perfect trio. Only their eyes weren’t on their hooves, focused instead to the side on Harry and Draco.  
  
“It’s an invitation,” Draco muttered. “But to  _what_ , I wonder?”  
  
Harry grinned at him and leaned forwards to put his free hand on the hooves, while keeping his other hand clasped with Draco’s. “Why don’t we find out?”  
  
 _I’m never going to get used to being bonded to a reckless Gryffindor,_ Draco snapped at him, but he was drawn along as much by Harry’s smile as by the grip on his wrist, which after all he could have resisted. He leaned in and put his hand next to Harry’s free one on the hooves.  
  
The hooves felt as warm as real skin beneath their touch, and Draco wondered for a moment if the mummidade had lured them close to burn them to death. But there had been no indication that the mummidade were capable of such an elaborate deception, and on the whole, Draco would prefer to wait until they had proof before jumping to conclusions. They had just seen an example of what happened when the mummidade did that.  
  
What happened, instead, was that the warmth burst into light beneath their hands, and they were swept away. Draco shut his eyes, but he had the feeling that it wouldn’t have made any difference. There was no blindness or seeing here, nothing but the intense golden-white of the light that enveloped them.  
  
The light, and the memory.  
  
*  
  
Harry found himself in a body that sprang over the grasses—  
  
No, he was in  _bodies_ , all of them scattered apart from each other but exquisitely aware of each other at the same time, kicking up their heels as they sprang and danced, the grass flying away behind them, the earth trampled beneath their hooves, and there was one to the side, and there was one above, and above the above—  
  
There were the birds.  
  
Harry understood it with his human mind somewhat lagging behind the intense impressions at first, the stamp and the flight and the wheeling as they tried to bury themselves in the dells, and the birds simply came down, and claws struck bodies and diminished them. He had lost limbs, he had lost minds, he had lost everything that was  _him_ , because what was him was many and living one at the same time, all running, all in flight.  
  
The birds didn’t care. They flew, and in the shadow of their wings, the death they brought was mourned.  
  
Harry felt himself lifting away at last from that experience, which he could never remember properly afterwards, except when he and Draco combined their memories in the bond. Humans weren’t meant to live like that, with different minds in different bodies, personalities as well as everything else scattered like seed to the winds and singing, rebounding from each other.  
  
He opened his eyes, and stepped away from the mummidade, wringing, gently, the hand that had clutched their hooves. Draco leaned heavily on him, and swallowed a little.  
  
 _It’s the same memory they used to tell us that they wanted us to go north and investigate the birds and the force calling them,_ Draco said, with the sound of a mental gulp.  _This time, they put us into it to try and overwhelm us, and make us agree with them.  
  
I don’t think so, _Harry said.  _They were trying to show us why they fear anything with wings and they want us to kill the riders._  
  
Draco stood there for a few seconds, and then said,  _Maybe you’re right. Is there anything we can do back, to make them understand that we see a difference in the different kinds of birds, and we aren’t about to kill the ones with four legs?_  
  
Harry blinked, then smiled at him.  _You’re a genius.  
  
Of course I am, _Draco said, with a heavy little sigh,  _but I have yet to see how that relates here._  
  
Harry turned back to the mummidade.  _Help me with the memories,_ he commanded, tightening his hold on Draco’s wrist.  _But this time, focus on the fact that those beasts the riders bond with have four legs as well as wings. If we emphasize their differences from the birds, the things that make them like the mummidade, then they might be more receptive to us leaving them alive.  
  
I think we should share the credit for the genius, _Draco said handsomely, and focused on the images of the beasts’ claws descending, the way their legs had rolled and waved helplessly when Harry sent them up and down the sky, and how they had stood, with their riders beside them, on the ground, watching the camp. Harry joined in as much as he could, adding other visions from different viewpoints, from the distances between him and Draco, which he thought the mummidade, with their multiple sets of eyes, would appreciate more.  
  
Goldensway watched them, eyes luminous. But not with understanding, not yet. It wasn’t until Harry brought back the memory of the first beast they had fought, in the night near the camp, and how it screamed more like an animal or a force of nature than like a bird that suddenly Goldensway moved forwards, their heads bobbing urgently.   
  
 _I think that’s it,_ Draco said.  
  
 _So do I._  
  
Goldensway moved in even nearer before Draco could respond with something sarcastic, the first body rearing to put its hooves on Draco’s shoulders, the second standing between them, and the third body leaning in and rearing against Harry. Harry breathed in the heavy, rank smell of the fur, and waited.  
  
The one that stood leaning against him leaned nearer yet, to the point that Harry thought one curl of its horns was going to poke out his eyes. The slotted eyes themselves were wide, and the hooves were stronger than paws, although lighter.   
  
 _If they hurt you, then they’ll be picking up pieces of themselves from the ground,_ Draco promised ominously.  
  
Harry sighed at him.  _They don’t mean to hurt us, I don’t think. They’re only curious to see what we’ll do, and not eager to let us go when we might have the power to fight the riders and their beasts.  
  
Oh, you don’t _think.  _That makes everything better, of course. I’m sure that I won’t worry now._  
  
Harry never knew how he would have responded, because the mummid on him pulled back and dropped, and all three bodies of Goldensway came together again, their horns leaning together with gentle clicks that almost made Harry forget how fearsome they had looked, close to. They focused on him for a second, then turned and looked at Draco, in a way that made Harry wonder if they had learned to see them as individuals.  
  
But only for a second, because the next image came from them in that second, brilliant with confidence in spite of the fact that Harry knew it was something they were making up. It showed Harry and Draco on the back of a wind, hovering high above the green meadow where the riders made their home, and speaking with a rider on the back of a beast. The air was unclear where their mouths moved. The mummidade knew they communicated with sounds, but not much more than that. The speaking, the  _negotiating,_ Harry thought, was the important thing.  
  
Then more pictures appeared, broader and also mistier. The green meadow Harry and Draco had shown Goldensway appeared again, but this time, grazing mummidade covered it. Riders and their beasts circled overhead, near the edges of the meadows, and when the shadows of birds came near, they dived at them and drove them away. And there was a cluster of human houses, obviously transplanted from the human camp, in one corner of the meadow, and shadowy humans walking among them.  
  
Harry had hardly recovered from that daring picture—that plan, he thought—before Goldensway sprang away from them, and two mummidade Harry had never seen before trotted in from the edges of the valley. The two central bodies of the triangle Goldensway stood in joined with the two newcomers, and the third mummid pulled back, by itself, near the edges. Near enough to be intelligent, Harry thought, not enough to be actually part of the group.  
  
“What’s going on?” Draco snapped. Harry thought he chose the audible words on purpose, as a reminder to himself that he  _could_ still speak, and dispel some of the spell the mummidade had cast over them.  
  
“I think we’ve just been volunteered as diplomats,” Harry said, and rubbed the back of his neck, which felt as though it ached with all the thoughts trickling down from his head. “With this new mummid, or these new mummidade, who’s probably more adept at negotiating.” He nodded cautiously at the new quartet.  
  
The image of a setting sun that blasted into his head was sharply edged with both clarity and shadows.  _Westshadow,_ sang the new mummidade.  
  
Draco nodded to show Harry he had heard it, too. “I was more wondering why they bothered to bring us to this valley in the first place,” he muttered. “What’s so special about the bloody place?”  
  
Harry hesitated, but there was no reason to keep this to himself, and more than enough to share it. “I think they can communicate more clearly here. You notice we knew that some colors meant uncertainty? And that this time, we didn’t have to argue about what we should call our new—ally?” He thought Draco might have some reason to object to “friend.”  
  
Draco blinked and stared at him. “By Merlin, Potter,” he said a minute later. “That was almost inspired.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes, smiling. “Well, you can credit it to your influence and the way I’m acting now that I’m in constant contact with your fine brain, if you want.”  
  
“I rather think I will,” Draco said, and faced Westshadow. “Why do they think this stupid thing is going to succeed, though?”  
  
“Why not ask them?”  
  
Draco gave him another sidelong look, said in his head,  _You needn’t get_ too  _worked-up about being a genius,_ and held out his hand again. Harry clasped it more than eagerly, and together, they turned to face Westshadow.  
  
Westshadow’s images were still sharp and clear, combined with a brisk, bracing quality to them that Harry thought of as wind sweeping around the edges and stirring the colors into something like pointed plumes of smoke. Westshadow pounded home images of the meadow, and the riders, and the birds lying broken on the ground the same way that Goldensway had pictured the riders. It didn’t seem to understand why they should want to hesitate.  
  
Harry, with Draco’s help, painted the image of the humans hovering helpless on the wind in front of the riders, their mouths moving. And then the riders attacked and hammered at them, and drove them away, and the image of the meadow with all three sentient peoples sharing it dissolved into nothingness.  
  
Westshadow stamped all sixteen hooves at once and gave them the meadow again, this time in the middle of a golden sunset that made Harry catch his breath. He reckoned that was the way summer looked on Hurricane. Either way, it was heart-shatteringly obvious that Westshadow saw nothing that could go wrong.  
  
Draco showed them the riders reeling up and down the air the way Harry had used them, and ignored the way Harry’s cheeks burned.  
  
Westshadow showed the rider who had dropped the meat, and the one who had accepted food from them, part of the memories that Harry and Draco had shared of their journey. It seemed to feel that was all they needed to settle a truce.  
  
 _Do we even know that they think of it like a truce? That’s a hard concept to convey through pictures alone._  
  
 _They know enough about it to think we should have one,_ Harry said, shaking his head a little when he noticed how hard Westshadow was staring at them.  _And for one, I’m not really going to argue with them.  
  
Do you think the second attempt to communicate with the riders is going to go any better than the first one?  
  
We’ll have Westshadow with us. It might be able to come up with something._  
  
Though they hadn’t reached out through the wild magic to touch Westshadow’s mind with pictures, it, or they, seemed to understand that they were agreeing with it. It turned towards the rim of the valley and scraped all four left front forehooves on the ground, glancing towards them over its shoulders.  
  
 _We can’t just leave like that, though,_ Draco pointed out.  _We’re waiting for Andromeda to come out, and the last time, we had Weasley and Granger. We don’t know if we’ll even make it as far as we did last time, and I don’t think the mummidade would appreciate it if we tried to fly with them._  
  
Harry cursed under his breath. That much was true. How fast could Westshadow run? Could it even keep up with them?  
  
Westshadow scraped its hooves again, and then turned towards the far corner of the valley. Harry turned with it, wondering what it could have to show them that they hadn’t already seen. The valley seemed to be a marvelous place for conveying information, and that was wonder enough for him.  
  
But Westshadow walked over and stood with its noses pointing at something, so Harry followed it, tugging Draco with him by the force of their joined hands.  
  
It was the pond they had seen as they came in over the valley, which Harry had noted only because he thought it might be one of the mummidade’s few sources of water for some miles. But this close—  
  
This close, he could see the glaze over the top of the pond, and realized that it was really one of the silver ovals they had seen beside the ruins on their journey to the north.  
  
Draco’s breath escaped him at the same time Harry’s did, but Harry thought their churning thoughts had mingled in the bond even before that.  
  
*  
  
 _What would the mummidade be doing with one of these?_  
  
The only response was Harry’s quiet, draining confusion, which made Draco decide that he should probably focus on finding the answer himself. He knelt down as close as he could to the silver oval without touching it, and plucked a clump of grass from the ground near his foot. They could at least find out whether this oval did the same thing to the grass that the first one they had seen had done to a stone.  
  
It did. The grass fell into the oval and twisted away, away, and down. Draco looked up before he grew sick watching it and glanced at Westshadow.  
  
Westshadow tilted two heads right and two heads left. It was dizzying, and didn’t help Draco at all. He touched Harry’s wrist more strongly so he could project the image of the oval destroying the grass, the first oval destroying the stone, and his likely guess of what it would do to a human body.  
  
Westshadow flung up its heads and snorted. Back came an image of mummidade floating through silver, flying through silver, their legs gently moving—  
  
And landing on a black and rocky shore, their heads tossed back as they faced something looming and without form, something that  _felt_ through the memory like Bodiless to Draco.  
  
Draco flinched, even as Harry murmured to him,  _Are they saying that they can use these ovals as ways to reach the north?_  
  
Draco nodded, even as Westshadow flashed pictures of the mummidade struggling against Bodiless and vanishing into the dark to him.  _Yes, I think so. And they probably stopped using them because every time they did, they just went straight into Bodiless and vanished there.  
  
Then what left all the ruins all over the place? Who used those other silver ovals? _  
  
Draco shook his head. The question wasn’t important to him right now, and he didn’t see why it should interest Harry much, either. They had other things to do, things that required agreement with Westshadow, who had grown sick of waiting, apparently, and was scraping its hooves against the ground with gentle, persistent regularity.  
  
 _Yes,_ he said, and knew that Harry was agreeing with him, if only because he wanted to solve the mystery that had so intrigued Granger.  _We’ll go._


	28. Negotiating

“At least let us come with you, mate.”  
  
Weasley’s voice was sharp-edged, and Draco wondered if he and Granger—fetched by a quick wind speaking in Harry’s voice from the camp—had forgotten that more people than their “mate” were standing here. Westshadow stamped and stomped behind them, regular rhythms that made Draco’s jaw ache. He didn’t even need an image or contact from the mummidade to translate that. They were getting impatient, and saw no reason why they, Harry, and Draco shouldn’t just leave.  
  
But, of course, Weasley and Granger had to debate.  
  
“You’re not bonded to anything,” Harry said, and Draco touched the middle of his back, because his voice had the same sharp edge as Weasley’s, and Draco admired him for that. “Draco and I are. The mummidade are bonded to each other. We’re protected against what Bodiless might do to our minds, as long as we concentrate on the bonds. Can you promise that you can help us if you come? Or are you just going to succumb, the way Hermione started to?”  
  
Weasley and Granger exchanged a long glance. Then Granger said, “I thought you were going to try and negotiate with the riders, not destroy Bodiless.”  
  
“But we’ll be vulnerable to Bodiless while we’re there,” Draco cut in, because no one was saying the obvious and he would do it if he had to. “That’s true no matter what we accomplish.” For a moment, he wished he was bonded to Weasley and Granger, too, because that way they would at least  _have_ to listen to him.  
  
Then he shuddered at the images that appeared in his head of Weasley and Granger having sex and he and Harry having to listen in. Or maybe the bond would even force them all to sleep together. Harry thought they were more strongly bonded because of their desire for each other, and that the bond had in part created that desire.  
  
 _Yes, let’s not wish for things to be different than they are,_ Harry said in the back of his mind.  _Or the wild magic might hear you and make it so._  
  
That wasn’t to be borne, so Draco pasted a smile on his lips and looked as appealingly as he could at Weasley and Granger. “Can’t you think of it like the ways that the mummidade combine?” he asked. “We need different combinations to face different dangers. Sometimes it’s just me and Harry. Sometimes it’s the four of us. Sometimes it’s the two of us plus the mummidade. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that you let us go by ourselves.”  
  
Weasley and Granger did their best to imitate his and Harry’s silent communication, but failed. But at least they came to some kind of consensus. Granger turned away and sighed, and Weasley said, “All right. But you’d better bring him back safely, Malfoy.” He raised a fist at Draco, who thought of the ways he could cut Weasley apart with his invisible weapons, and smiled.  
  
 _Can you not get along with him for three seconds?_ Harry snapped in Draco’s direction, and reached out to clasp his friends’ hands. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I promise, we’ll fight beside each other.”  
  
Westshadow snapped all its hooves down at once and crowded forwards, staring at them. If it understood, Draco thought, that was probably a silent promise to protect them as well, but right now, it was all impatience to be gone, and it turned its heads and looked at the silver oval in the corner of the valley.  
  
“Are you sure that you should be going into one of those, Harry?” Granger was apparently the master of the last-minute fear, and she pressed her hand to her mouth as she looked between them and the oval. “You saw what the one we found near the ruins did to that stone…”  
  
“And this one did the same thing with the grass,” Harry told her. “But the mummidade gave us memories of surviving it, and as far as we know, they don’t know how to lie.”  
  
“But they could be mistaken,” Granger said, and stepped forwards as if they would have to fight the argument all over again. “Or they could be able to survive it, and they don’t know that you can’t, because no human has ever gone through one before.”  
  
Harry opened his mouth, and Draco knew from the darkness flooding the bond that he would probably give in and keep discussing it with his friends until Bodiless managed to reach down from the north and claim them all.  
  
“Oh,  _honestly_ ,” Draco snapped, and stuck his foot in the silver oval.  
  
It felt like silence engulfing him. For a moment there was a hesitation, as if the magic in the oval wondered what it was touching, and then Draco felt the same sensation that he did when he hung motionless in the middle of the air on Harry’s wind. Then he was sinking, gentle, slow, but without pain.  
  
“If this is the way I’m going to die, at least no one’s going to be chattering at me while I do it,” he told them, and then leaned back and stretched his arms out the way he would when floating in the sea.  
  
 _Draco. And you scold_ me  _for being reckless,_ Harry’s voice snapped in his ears as he jumped into the water. Draco felt Harry shoving at him, less with hands than with magic, and then they were side-by-side, and Harry was calling farewell to Weasley and Granger with his voice while saying something quite different to Draco.  _You idiot, what was I supposed to do when you were sinking out of sight?  
  
Is that what it looked like? Did the same thing happen to my body as it did with the stone and the grass? _Draco didn’t intend to speak aloud; whatever surrounded them was gentle, and they seemed to be breathing easily enough, but he still didn’t want it in his mouth. He looked up and down, and saw nothing but silver. Still, they were moving; the downwards pull continued.  _Is Westshadow following us?  
  
Yes, your body bent just like that, _Harry said.  _Almost gave me a heart attack._ His hand brushed Draco’s as he turned himself over on his back to look above them, and Draco knew it meant things that would have been difficult for even them to talk about.  _I think I can see Westshadow above us. You look.  
  
_ Draco snorted as he obediently gazed above them, turning his head back and forth and now and then opening and closing his eyes when all that still, soft silver was too much for him at first.  _As if you do all the work all the time.  
  
Shut up and look, you. _Harry was smiling into his head.  
  
Draco squinted some more, and then nodded, because there was a series of white specks moving after them, and while almost anything might live in the silver ovals, Draco noticed that these specks all kept together in a four-formation. That was too much of a coincidence. _Yes, I can see him coming. Or them. Whatever you should call a quartet of mummidade who think of themselves as one being.  
  
Not think of themselves. _Are. Harry leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Draco did have to admit the sensation was nice, like warm water flowing past you.  _I wonder if the riders and the beasts think of themselves the same way, however they bond. Are they two who work together, or a pair who are one?  
  
It might be different for them. I got the sense that it was the riders who were intelligent, and directing the beasts. The beasts never struck me as anything more than animals.  
  
But one of them came alone to watch our camp.  
  
Acting on orders.  
  
Pretty smart if they can understand orders that well and remember them when they were so far away. Smarter than dogs, anyway.  
  
_So they wrangled as they sank through the silver, and their arguments were friendly, and Draco knew Harry had forgiven him for the leap—if he had anything to forgive him for—and Draco forgave him for listening too much to his friends and prolonging an argument that had grown perfectly ridiculous already.  
  
Harry snorted. Draco could feel the pressure of all the things that he wouldn’t say, all the things he  _could_ have said.  
  
But he didn’t say them, and that was part of what made their float through the silver oval to the other side, the other “shore,” maybe, all right.  
  
*  
  
The silverness around them reversed itself while Harry was talking to Draco about whether bonding with a beast who wouldn’t question or disobey you was better or worse than bonding with another human. One moment they were drifting down, and the next, they were drifting  _up_.  
  
Harry stretched his arms out in front of him and moved so that he was shielding Draco from whatever might wait above the surface of the water. Draco spluttered and spat at him, but Harry shook his head. He didn’t think they were suddenly less able to breathe the silver; it was just thicker here, and they were  _thinking_ of it more like water.  
  
Then the surface broke through them, or they broke through it, and Harry found himself on a shore of rocks before he thought about it.  _As if it spat us out,_ he told Draco while they both rolled out of the way so that the mummidade would have room to scramble out of the pond when they got here.  
  
Draco snorted, but said nothing. He was staring around, and Harry stood up and did the same.  
  
He had assumed, without thinking about it, that this particular oval would bring them straight to the green meadow they had reached before. But that was impossible, when he thought about it, because the mummidade hadn’t known about the riders, and surely they would have if they’d had a doorway that once led straight into the heart of the riders’ home territory.  
  
No, instead they stood on what looked like the northern slope of a huge mountain, black and shiny like obsidian. Harry bent down and picked up one stone, turning it around in his hand. Then he winced and dropped it. Like obsidian, it had small, sharp points that were almost impossible to see, and it had cut his palm.  
  
Draco flicked a sardonic glance at him, but said nothing, instead turning to the mountain in front of him and studying it. “I don’t recognize this at all,” he said at last, maybe to hear his own voice in the lull of the wind. “Do you?”  
  
Harry shook his head, and at that moment, Westshadow arrived, as the clatter of hooves behind them announced. Harry turned around and touched Draco’s hand, so they could project an image of clustered paths leading in many directions.  _Which way from here?_  
  
Westshadow tilted its heads back and forth, one to each major compass point, then back to the points in between. Then it leaped forwards, and the four bodies trotted towards the direction Harry had tentatively identified as the west.  
  
 _Of course,_ Draco said, and fell in behind them.  
  
Harry followed him with a faint smile, although he kept a net of winds circling above his head, ready to snatch them into the air at the first sign of danger. So far, it seemed that Westshadow was living up to its name.  
  
 _Their name. His name. Whatever you call a mummidade.  
  
I think it should be their name, _Draco said.  _Because we see them as made up of multiple beings, whatever they really think of themselves, and our perception is the one that matters.  
  
If we negotiate successfully with the riders, you’ll have to give up all that human-centricity, _Harry said, and made sure that Westshadow was climbing a slope that rose gently in front of them, without any place that would be too hard for Draco’s feet.   
  
 _You take such care for my comfort._  
  
Harry shot a tentative glance at Draco, to tell, if he could, whether Draco was sarcastic or not. But from the dancing white and pink that came down the bond, Draco didn’t know himself. He caught Harry’s eye and shook his head a little.  
  
“It’s nice of you to be concerned for me,” he said. “But it still surprises me, when I think about it. I got so used to standing alone that last year before we left the wizarding world.”  
  
“Care to tell me about it?” Harry asked, extending a hand to Draco so that they could clamber over a boulder Westshadow’s bodies had simply leaped over.  
  
Draco accepted his help, but his fingers were sinking into the warm skin of Harry’s wrist, pressing a message into the tendon that Harry didn’t understand until he heard the words. “I don’t know. Do you care to tell me about your childhood, and what made you so ready to take up the role of a hero even before you heard that a prophecy had designated you for that?”  
  
Harry winced, and might have dropped Draco’s hand, but Draco simply shifted his balance and dug into the hold. Harry turned his glance ahead and kept grimly climbing, in silence. It would be easier to climb with two of them.  
  
 _Harry_.  _You have to talk about it sometime.  
  
I didn’t offer to let you talk about the loneliness you were experiencing because I wanted to use that as ammunition against you, _Harry snapped back.  
  
Draco was silent, in both the bond and his voice, for a little while longer. The black slope was starting to level out ahead of them, and Harry thought he might recognize this place after all. The crest of the mountain was rising in a distinctive saddle that he had glimpsed in the far east from the riders’ valley.  
  
 _You think that’s what I would do?_ Draco whispered.  _Use whatever you tell me as a weapon against you?  
  
Not—really, _Harry said.  _But you would think that it explains everything about me. Like you just said, that I was primed to be a hero because of my shitty childhood or something. I want to tell you things about me, but not if you’re going to think you have to_ analyze  _me because of them. And let me remind you that there’s a gate between you and the Dursleys now, anyway,_ he added, cheering up a little as he remembered that.  _If Teddy and Andromeda can’t go back through the gate because of their wild magic, then you definitely can’t.  
  
They did something I would want to punish them for, then? More than you’ve told me so far.  
  
_Harry shook his head.  _Should we really be concentrating on this right now? We might be facing the riders any second, or Bodiless.  
  
We’ll always be facing some enemy. We haven’t had a quiet moment since we got back to the camp from our journey to the north. Yes, I want to know, if you’ll tell me._  
  
That, Harry discovered, was where the wordless nature of the bond was an advantage. He could feel Draco’s sincerity, gold-veined white, and he could give memories back, if he wanted, memories of small dark places and hunger and shame and accidental magic and bewilderment and imprisonment, without having to explain everything. There were words echoing in there, ones like “Freak” and “Filthy,” but Draco would hear them as part of the whole, not in Harry’s voice.  
  
 _Aunt Petunia’s voice, if anything._ But Harry didn’t have to take that thought in, either. He focused his eyes on the rock in front of them and climbed while Draco dealt with memories new to him, though old to Harry.   
  
*  
  
Draco shuddered as he finally struggled out of the overwhelming maze and mess of emotions Harry had pushed at him. There had been a pervading stink to them, not physical. No wonder Harry didn’t want to think about them now, and hadn’t been willing to talk about them in any detail.  
  
Well, he had handed the details to Draco, though Draco knew it would take him a long time to sort through them and pick out individual days, or even weeks. But they had time. Draco planned that they would both survive this meeting with the riders, and whatever problem with Bodiless might follow it.  
  
He reached out to put his hand in the middle of Harry’s back, and in that second, the sky darkened above them.  
  
Harry raised winds in an immediate dome over them, and over Westshadow, who had stopped ahead and now stood there with all four heads tilted back, golden slotted eyes fixed on the riders. Draco counted five of them, more than enough to cast the given area in shadow. One rode the largest beast he had seen yet, and leaned over the side of its back to study them. Draco had no idea what it would see. He thought about lifting a hand and waving, but they might interpret that as a hostile gesture, too.  
  
Finally, the largest beast dropped. The rider had its hood thrown back, and its claws lay lightly on the reins. The beast spread its wings at a cawed order—so Draco assumed, although of course they understood nothing of the riders’ language—and hovered above them. Part of their magic had to relate to the winds, Draco thought, or else their bones and muscles. There was no way giant creatures could simply hang in the air like that otherwise.  
  
Westshadow looked back at Harry and Draco with one head, up to the riders with another, and ahead with the next two. The image that slammed into Draco involved him and Harry moving closer and touching those back two heads.  
  
 _I don’t have any better ideas,_ Harry confessed when Draco glanced at him.  
  
Draco nodded, and they did it. The shaggy hair of the mummidade felt silkier when he had a chance to concentrate on touching it, and warm, as though the bodies beneath the fur was blazing with heat. He shifted his stance so that he could look up at the hovering rider without straining his neck.  
  
The beast had dropped nearer still. The rider was fanning its claws out towards them, but Draco had no idea what the gesture meant; it could have been anything from a threat or a warding to an invitation.  
  
But there was no uncertainty about the way Westshadow had taken it. Long before Draco was prepared for it, the two quarters of Westshadow who had stood staring into the west turned, crouched like great cats, and leaped into the air.  
  
Both of them soared up in the same long, curving springs that they had shown Draco and Harry in their memories when they tried to escape the birds. But Draco had seen those memories from a mummid’s perspective, and hadn’t realized how bloody  _high_ they could go. Up and up they soared, and spread their legs like wings when they reached the height of the beast’s claws.  
  
The rider stared at them with a parted beak, watching them coming without an attempt to fend them off. Now and then, its black eyes stared at the ground, but it paid more attention when one mummid floated up to its beast’s beak and one floated up to it.  
  
The rider hesitated, looked down at the ground several times as if trying to survey the distance between them, and then imitated Harry and Draco, splaying its claws flat on the mummid’s head.  
  
The beast reacted to orders that seemed silent, leaning the edge of its beak on the mummid beside it, almost forcing it back to the ground.  
  
Draco felt a silent, enormous breath draw it in all around them, and nearly looked down to see if the black mountain they stood on was breathing.  
  
But instead, passing through all of them, came the closing of a great golden ring, a bond that made Draco sway and nearly fall. Harry supported him, and so did the mummid whose head he kept his hand on, and so, somehow, did the rider and the beast.  
  
For a few seconds, they stood there, Draco hearing Harry’s heartbeat and the thrumming of others from beside him, and overhead, and under his feet.  
  
Then Westshadow  _spoke_. And it was real language, human language, not the images he had sent so far, although when Draco thought about it later, he had to admit that the rider probably interpreted it as his own language and Westshadow probably saw images, the way that the bond between him and Harry sometimes held pictures and sometimes words and sometimes emotions. It was a new channel of communication, and of course it would pass through their minds and pick up whatever was most conducive to its purpose there.  
  
 _This is better. Now we can negotiate._  
  
A shared heartbeat like a bell swayed them all, and Draco shivered. From his thoughts, welling up despite himself, came the realization that this was overwhelming and he hoped it would be over soon.  
  
 _We do not like connecting this way, either,_ Westshadow agreed.  _But it does not need to be long. This is what we want._  
  
And there was another blurred image of the meadow it had shown them once before, with riders flying and human houses and mummidade grazing. Draco wondered why he was still seeing it as a picture instead of words, then snorted. It would take less time to show the riders what they intended than explain every nuance.  
  
The rider opened his beak. A rush of language came down the bond to Draco, flavored all the while with a haughty metallic tone that echoed a crow’s.  _Why should we let you have this? You would eat all the grass that our herds depend on and we would have to defend you as well as ourselves. What would we gain?_  
  
Westshadow flashed back an image of the mummidade standing against what Draco thought was a black mountain at first, and finally realized was an imagining of Bodiless.  _We can do this if we can bring enough of us through. We lost to it once because only a few of us lived in the north, and we need numbers to make up our strength. And when we lose one, our number and the bonds we can combine in are greatly limited. If you can guard us after the battle, though, we are willing to fight it._  
  
Draco shuddered a little. He wondered if the mummidade had always had a concept of war, or if it was something that Bodiless had taught them.  
  
On the other hand, they knew about the birds, and they had a conflict with them if nothing else. Draco had to admit that he didn’t know what was native to the mummidade and what wasn’t.  
  
 _You will lose more than one if you face the Darkness in the North._  
  
That name was almost certainly translated straight from the riders’ language, Draco thought. He liked it better than Bodiless.  
  
 _We can help,_ Harry said, because of course he would. Draco would have liked to hiss at him to shut up, but when they were all joined like this, everyone else would hear, too.  _We might be able to help during the battle, and we would like a safe place. This meadow looks more like the—place we came from._ Draco sensed this temporary bond probably couldn’t translate “Earth,” and maybe not the concept of “planet,” either.  _Our people would have more safety and company here._  
  
The rider was silent for a long second, during which their shared heartbeats and the beast’s wings flapping were the loudest sound. Then he said,  _There are many more of us than of you walkers, and we are not all bonded to each other the way the leapers are. I do not have the wings to speak for everyone. I will have to go back and talk to them, and learn if this is something they would want._  
  
 _We will wait,_ Westshadow had, and the two mummid hovering in the air dived down and landed near their other halves again.  
  
Draco shuddered as the bond broke. He half-hoped they would manage to leave him out of it when they formed it again. Yes, it was incredible, but it was also threatening to his sense of self.  
  
The rider wheeled back into the sky and screeched something at the others who hung behind him. They turned and traveled to the west with incredible speed.  
  
Westshadow lay all its bodies down at once and shut its eyes. Draco turned to Harry.  _What do we do now?_  
  
 _We wait,_ Harry answered, and lay down with his hands behind his head and his eyes closed, leaving Draco to wonder if he was the only impatient person in the universe.


	29. Open Wings, Open Words

Draco had drifted through two restless dreams and two entirely silent quarrels with Harry before they heard the sound of the beasts’ wings above them again. Draco actually wasn’t sure who had heard them first, he or Harry; they shared senses the way they did everything else when they were closely bonded like this.  
  
Either way, Draco turned his head upwards and opened his eyes, and Harry was beside him with a hand on his shoulder doing the same thing, and they watched as the beasts turned and wheeled, faster than the birds. And no doubt deadlier, with the riders on their backs, Draco thought.  
  
He was glad they weren’t in close contact with the mummidade right now. Thoughts comparing the beasts to the birds might have panicked them.  
  
If they were inclined to panic, though, they didn’t show it. Westshadow stood with all four of its heads pointed towards the beasts, and didn’t flinch when the shadows swept over them. For a moment, Draco thought they would spring up again and resume the bond, but instead they waited, as stolid as statues, for the riders to descend.  
  
The one who came down was the same one from before, as far as Draco could judge from the size of his beast, although his face and cloak and reins all looked the same as any other rider’s. Draco frowned and wondered when they would learn enough to make an identification. At least the mummid way of communication by image meant they knew who they were talking to at any one time.  
  
The rider landed his beast a few steps from them, which meant Draco had to retreat from the stink of carrion that wafted from its beak and talons. The beast blinked its great eyes at him and laid its head on the ground as the rider touched it. The rider leaped to the ground and folded the claws he had in place of fingers, looking from one of them to the other.  
  
This time, Westshadow divided its bodies evenly, sending one to Draco, one to Harry, one to the rider, and one to the beast. The rider nodded and laid his hands in place on the mummid’s forehead, above the slanting golden eyes, even before Harry and Draco could touch their parts of Westshadow. The mummid blinked a little at the sight of those talons, but didn’t flinch.  
  
Draco shook his head a second longer. Of course. Westshadow was in contact with them, and Harry and Draco didn’t fear the riders putting a mummid’s eyes out, so Westshadow refused to fear it, either. It was so hard sometimes, remembering what the mummidade knew at any one moment.  
  
 _What have your people said?_ Westshadow demanded, as the bond settled into place again. Draco wanted to shudder, but gritted his teeth and held on instead. At least the mummid beneath him was solid and didn’t mind Draco sinking both his thumbs into the silky fur.  
  
 _They think that it might be dangerous to have you here,_ the rider replied.  _How many of you are there? How much do you eat?  
  
How many are there of _you?  _Your beasts must eat more than you do._ Westshadow’s voice didn’t tremble, although Draco had to admit that if he were four-legged himself, he would flinch when thinking about what the beasts ate.  
  
 _We—_ For a moment, the bond went fuzzy, as the rider apparently said something that had no equivalent in any other language. He clacked his beak a moment later, and said,  _We control our breeding. I don’t know if you are going to do that._ He cast a dubious look at Draco and Harry, and Draco wondered whether he had picked up on Draco’s instinctive revulsion at the idea. After all, for centuries the problem in the wizarding world had been how to encourage reproduction, not halt it.  
  
 _We breed only as many as the grass can sustain,_ Westshadow said calmly, and then turned all its heads to look at Draco and Harry.  
  
Draco stared back with his lip curling a little. There was a lot he could say about the children he wanted to have with Harry, but it would also mean talking about the ritual they wanted to perform, and he didn’t know if the mummidade would consent to teach it to them.  
  
 _You do not hatch from eggs?_ the rider asked, sounding more than a little revolted.  
  
 _You do not come from the magic?_ Westshadow stamped all four left forehooves, scraping at the grass and tossing up a little puff of dust.   
  
 _No,_ Draco snapped back. They must have picked up images of pregnancy, maybe from Harry. Harry shoved back reassurance, and enabled Draco to lower his shoulders and continue speaking without being offended.  _We come from the bellies and the hearts of two of us. But two men—two like us—can’t have children that way. They would have to come from the magic._  
  
Westshadow tossed all its heads.  _We will teach you the dance at once._  
  
 _But that would leave you to have many children,_ said the rider.  _What would happen when you outgrew the valley?_  
  
 _We would find some other safe place at a distance,_ Harry said, his mental voice so calm that Draco had a hard time believing it was him, even with the confirmation of their private bond.  _There are many other groups of humans who came through the gate to this world with us, although some of them are probably dead by now, and we knows others are. We would be small for many years._  
  
The rider clacked his beak again. Draco glanced at him. He had his shoulders hunched, a small breeze that didn’t feel like one of Harry’s ruffling the slender black feathers on his body.  
  
 _Can you give us something to call you?_ Draco asked.  _We know what our names are, and Westshadow’s, but not yours._  
  
The rider glanced at him for a moment, then clacked and rattled his beak, as well as extending his claws up and down in a pattern.  
  
Draco shook his head.  _That doesn’t translate through the bond._  
  
He had been worried the rider might not understand the concept of “translate,” but a moment later, his feathers lay down, and he clacked his beak again.  _You have my permission to call me Open Wings, and my partner Swoop._  
  
Draco nodded at the beast, which still lay watching them motionless, with its head not moving from the ground. He supposed that settled the question of whether the riders considered their beasts true partners or unintelligent creatures simply tied to them by magic that would allow them to resist Bodiless.  
  
 _If you come to our meadow, you must not grow fast,_ Open Wings insisted, with another gesture that looked as though he was using his claws to rake flies out of the air.  _Or you must agree to control your growth when you reach a certain point.  
  
Or leave? _Harry asked.  
  
 _Leaving would be well._  
  
Harry bobbed his head.  _Then I don’t see why we shouldn’t agree. You would be the ones to decide when we grew too big for the valley, and some of us would leave when that happened._  
  
Draco flicked a quick image of Andromeda and some of the Weasleys. That group argued about things endlessly when it was only them in their own relatively safe camp. Were they  _really_ going to calmly accept an order to leave a place that they had come to regard as home, because they had too many children?  
  
That was assuming they even agreed to leave their camp by the spring to come here, of course. Draco could just imagine the amount of argument that was going to take, and grimaced.  
  
 _We would decide,_ Open Wings agreed, with a slow inclination of his head.  _But before that can happen, the battle with the Darkness in the North must happen. When will you gather enough of your own kind to fight it?_ he added, turning to face Westshadow.  
  
 _We will gather them immediately,_ Westshadow said, and all its heads turned in the direction of the silver oval.  _They can come through there, the same way that we did. There is no saying that we may not have the battle over before the day is._  
  
Then its bodies all moved at once, and headed towards the silver oval at a steady gallop, which became leaps before it was very far away. Draco swayed from the breaking of the bond, and glanced at Harry, who smiled a little and shook his head.  _No, I don’t think we’ll ever get used to the mummidade. But at least you know now that they won’t mind teaching us the dance that will allow us to have children._  
  
 _But do you want to have them?_ Draco insisted. He had worried for a moment that Westshadow would hate them for spying on the dance by the sea, but he should have wondered more about Harry’s reaction.  
  
Harry stared into the distance for a few seconds, his eyes so dim the bond seemed to flicker and splutter like a dying candle. Draco couldn’t get any sense of what he felt through the bond, at least. Then he turned back and said aloud, “I might like to have a child. Only when I know that Teddy wouldn’t mind and is either grown up or on his way there, though.”  
  
Draco rolled his eyes.  _You would make me wait years?  
  
Maybe that would be a good idea, since the riders don’t want us to grow too big anyway, _Harry retorted.  
  
Draco started and turned back to face Open Wings. With the bond the mummidade had created shattered, it was easy to dismiss the rider, to push him back to being “someone else.” But Draco also found it hard to forget that he had heard Open Wings speak with an intelligible voice, now he was thinking about it.  
  
His eyes on them, Open Wings moved back and placed one hand on the neck of his beast. Swoop lifted its head, looked at them with what Draco thought was indifference, and laid his wing down. Open Wings ran up it as lightly as though it was a ramp, and landed in the middle of Swoop’s back, where he sat and stared at them again.  
  
Harry nudged Draco in the ribs and bowed. Draco rolled his eyes, but did the gesture along with him. He thought it was more than a bit useless. More than likely, Open Wings wouldn’t even know what it meant.  
  
From the way Open Wings looked at them, though, Draco decided he might know, after all. For a moment, his hands quivered on the reins, and then he jerked his head back at them and snapped the reins on Swoop’s neck. Swoop leaped up with that effortless grace the beasts had and joined the others who had never ceased to circle overhead. In a few seconds they’d turned and were soaring their way back to the valley.  
  
Draco glanced at Harry. “Well?” he asked, speaking aloud because it felt good to do so. “Do you want to stay here and wait for the outcome of the battle, or go back to the camp?”  
  
Harry grinned at him ruefully. “Go back to the camp. I think it’ll take at least as long as the battle to persuade the others, don’t you?”  
  
Draco thought of it, and snorted. Yes, Harry and he could take Teddy, and Granger and Weasley would add their voices to Harry and Draco’s, since they had been to the meadow as well and seen how rich it was. But the other Weasleys would want to stick to the houses they had built so far, and God knew what Andromeda would do.  
  
“I’ll leave the negotiating up to you,” he said.  
  
 _I knew you would agree I was better than you at something,_ Harry said cheerfully, and avoided Draco’s punch by neatly scooping him up with wind for the journey to the silver oval.  
  
*  
  
Harry had thought about what they would say on their flight back through the silver oval, and although he hadn’t come up with anything as magical as an incantation, he  _had_ come up with something that he thought would work. He stepped out of the silver oval into the hidden valley with his mind buzzing with the words.  
  
 _They’re not going to like that,_ Draco said into his brain, right on cue.  
  
Harry rolled his eyes and glanced sideways at him.  _Of course they’re not. But they don’t like anything about Hurricane, some of them, and the others are willing to work with us if we make it appealing enough. I’m going to make it as appealing as I can.  
  
Someone like the werewolf will resist just because he can._  
  
Harry rolled his eyes again.  _You could call him by his real name, and that would probably eliminate half the problems between you._  
  
Draco said nothing, but the pulse in the back of Harry’s mind, through the bond, grew heavier and sharper both at once, like a boulder that someone had carved into a weapon. Harry nodded in recognition and used his winds to lift them both up through the rim of the hidden valley. They had to get back to camp as soon as possible, both so that Harry wouldn’t forget the words he had come up with and because he wanted to see if Andromeda had come out of her house. Her new ability might prove to be even more useful in the valley, if they moved there, because it would save them the labor of raising new houses.  
  
 _I’ll remember the words of your little speech if you forget them._  
  
Harry turned on his back on the winds, ignoring the way Draco winced when he did that, and blinked at Draco. He recognized the words for the peace offering they were, and nodded.  _Thank you,_ he sent, when Draco looked less than impressed at the nod.  
  
Draco rolled his eyes in turn, but said nothing as Harry skimmed them above the grass in the direction of the camp. It came into sight before Harry was ready for it; he had forgotten how short the journey to the mummidade’s hidden valley really was. He exchanged one more glance with Draco, and then plunged downwards.  
  
Hermione and Ron ran to meet them at once, and Hermione grabbed his arms and stared into his face. Harry blinked as he saw the red tinge to her cheeks and realized how hard it must have been for her to stay behind, when she was dying to learn more about the mystery of the silver ovals.  
  
 _Yes, I just weep for Granger._  
  
Harry smiled at Hermione as the flood of questions began and shook his head, simply interrupting to give her the most important information he could. “No, the battle isn’t over yet. But Westshadow and the other mummidade are going to fight it for us. What’s more important is that we’ve got permission from the riders to move our little group north to their meadow.”  
  
Hermione stared at him, and then almost stomped her foot, and Harry started a little. “So many  _important_ things are happening,” Hermione whispered. “And they’re happening faster than they have since we’ve been on Hurricane. And I had to stay  _here_ and out of them.”  
  
Harry decided to change the speech a little after all. He hadn’t been sure that he could count on Hermione’s whole-hearted support when he first dreamed it up. “Then this is your chance,” he said. “We’re going north, into the middle of the meadow, into the middle of—everything. Help me convince the others that we  _should_ go, instead of staying here because it’s safe and familiar. That’s something you could do that would be more helpful than anything else, and it’s something only  _you_  can.”  
  
For a moment, Hermione stood still, staring at him. Then she nodded rapidly and turned to Ron. “You want to go, don’t you?” she demanded.  
  
“I want you to be happy,” Ron said, looking back and forth between Harry and Hermione as if to reassure Harry that he considered him someone he wanted to be happy, too. “And if going north is what it’s going to take…”  
  
Hermione melted as fast as she could sometimes, and reached out for Ron’s hands. “Oh, Ron, I didn’t mean to say—if your family isn’t going to be happy about this, and you know they’re not, then how will you choose?”  
  
“They don’t have a strong reason to stay here,” Ron said, looking around. “We don’t have much water. We’re under constant threat of attack by birds. There have been lots of arguments here, and Ginny wants to go further afield with her bird, and there’s the possibility that someone else might come upon us and want what we have. This is our best chance of understanding Hurricane more and having someone else to share the work of getting food and guarding us. We can put it in those terms, and then they might listen to us.”  
  
“But the greenhouses…” Hermione said, staring at them. “I don’t know what we can do about the Earth plants…”  
  
“Lift them with soil clinging around their roots,” Harry said. “Or lift the pots.” He knew Hermione had planted the ones that were most resistant to native Hurricane earth in pots. “It’s the work of a second for my winds to do.”  
  
Hermione turned glowing eyes on him. “Would you  _really_ , Harry? That’s the best—that’s the best thing anyone’s ever offered to do—”  
  
Harry cleared his throat in some embarrassment. “Of course,” he muttered. “We’re here to colonize Hurricane and make a life. Not much of a life if we don’t bring  _some_ food we’re familiar with along.”  
  
Hermione nodded rapidly. “And let me speak to them, too,” she added, trotting ahead. “If you’re not the only one trying to persuade them…”  
  
Harry smiled as he followed her, and exchanged the smile with Ron. If anyone could make the move from their permanent campsite to the north  _easy_ , then Hermione was that person.  
  
 _And notice I said nothing, and left you alone to talk to your friends like the virtuous little Slytherin I am,_ Draco added behind him.  
  
Harry started and turned to him.  _I didn’t mean to force you out.  
  
I know. You just weren’t thinking about me. _Draco’s eyes held him, gentle as his claws could sometimes be.  _And that’s all right. Sometimes. When we go north and we’re settled, though, I’m going to demand a lot more of you._  
  
Harry couldn’t help the smile that broke across his face at the thought, and Draco played lightly with his fingers as they moved further into the camp.  
  
*  
  
“This is the best chance we have. Once we’re in the north, we can relax this constant vigilance, the fear that the birds will come back at any time, because we’ll have someone to guard our backs and look out for us…”  
  
Draco sneaked a covert glance around the circle of (mostly) Weasleys seated on the grass, watching, especially, the way they stared at Harry. They looked less resistant than they had at some times in the past. That was in large measure the result of the tactic Harry had chosen, Draco had to admit. Harry had decided to emphasize that the north would result in less work and more leisure, and for people who had worked harder than they ever had in their lives since coming to Hurricane, that was an attractive picture.  
  
 _As though you were a menial laborer in the past._  
  
Draco sniffed.  _At least I have the excuse of growing up with house-elves._  
  
The werewolf leaned forwards, of course, before the echoes of Harry’s last words had faded on the air. “And how do we know we can trust these riders?” he demanded. “They might want anything from us, and they might ask it after we’ve already abandoned our independence and moved up there.”  
  
“What do we have that they would want?” Harry faced the man with calm resignation in his voice, his face, his eyes. “They could fly south and raid us if they wanted to; they could have done that  _already_ , the first time we went north and revealed we existed. They have all the food they want in the north. They can fight the birds. They have wild magic, more sophisticated than the kind we wield.” He had decided not to make it public knowledge that he had reeled the riders up and down the sky, Draco thought, and wisely. That would probably only make them distrust Harry more, instead of less. “They can ally with us, but they wouldn’t gain anything from raiding us.”  
  
“That’s what you think,” the werewolf muttered, folding his arms. “They could be fooling you, and just hoping that we  _will_ make the bargain, so they can take advantage of us.”  
  
And Harry changed. Draco felt the jump in the bond a moment before he abandoned the speech he had come up with and leaned forwards, with a nasty smile on his mouth that Draco had never seen before.  
  
“Yes, that is what I think,” Harry said, quietly, in a clipped voice. “You want to know something  _else_ I think? That you doubt everything I say, and I’m  _sick_ of it. I haven’t betrayed you. You chose to come here. I did things that I shouldn’t have in the wizarding world. But if you’re going to hold that against me, then I might as well give up on trying to persuade you of anything.”  
  
“You took up with Malfoy,” the Weasley mother said, frowning at Draco as if he was something on the bottom of her shoe. “That needs some forgiveness.”  
  
“And he’s helped us with defense duty, and come with me on the journeys that are the most dangerous things we’ve done on Hurricane, and helped us with the duties like weeding and guarding the camp that he would have assumed were beneath him, before,” Harry said, with a little shrug. “I don’t know what else he can do to convince you that he’s on our side, and I don’t care, not anymore. I’m going north, and I’m taking Teddy with me.”  
  
“What about Andromeda?” the Dragon-Keeper asked, glancing at the silver house that still sat in the center of the camp.  
  
“I don’t know whether she’s coming out again,” Harry said shortly. “I can bring her north to see Teddy, if that’s what she wants. She would be welcome to come with us. But all I can  _do_ is extend the invitation—to anyone. You keep talking as though I have a duty to make you like it, too, and I  _don’t_. I can protect you and invite you and try to help you without you liking it. You have to make up your own minds, now. I can’t give you any more time.”  
  
He turned away, and Draco smiled sweetly at them before he stood up to accompany Harry away from the circle.   
  
 _I’m proud of you,_ he told Harry, with a caress down the bond, and Harry nodded shortly.  
  
“I didn’t want to do that,” he muttered. “But God, they will not  _let it go_.”  
  
Draco shrugged. He could understand the Weasleys’ hatred for him, and their reluctance to acknowledge his bond with Harry. But at some point, they either had to accept him, if grudgingly, unless he did something new and wrong, or they had to admit that they cared more about the past than the present and more about the wizarding world than Hurricane. They shouldn’t say they had forgiven the past, as Draco had asked them to when he claimed his debt for saving the youngest Weasley, and then bring it up over and over again.  
  
He would have tried to say that aloud, because Harry needed to hear it right now, but the sky darkened above them then, the deep blue crumpling in from the horizon as though someone had wadded the sky up like a handkerchief, and there was a low, dull roar that seemed to radiate from all the corners of heaven. Draco stared at it, then at Harry.  
  
Harry already had his arm up in front of him, his eyes narrowed. “I think the battle is starting in the north,” he said.  
  
And then the winds came down on them, and proved him wrong.


	30. The Darkness in the North

The crack of the winds in his ears told Harry the truth even before they fastened great jaws around him and tried to lift him off his feet. This wasn’t his magic anymore. This was Bodiless, the Darkness in the North, whatever one wanted to call it, reaching for any power it could to fight the assembled mummidade.  
  
 _Their getting together for the battle was quick,_ Harry thought for one numb moment, and then he shook his head. Of course it was quick, when the mummidade were many minds in the same bodies, and all knew each other’s will at once. He had to concentrate on the problem in front of him, instead of risking distraction by his thoughts.  
  
He turned and set his back to Draco and the others, delving into himself and calling up the level of power that he had used to roll the riders up and down the sky. He was going to protect them now. He refused to accept anything less, refused to accept that he might lose someone to this power.  
  
Harry had had strength and wild magic before they came to Hurricane, the only one who did. He commanded it now, and felt it come hesitantly to life inside him, vast and flowing, a well of quicksilver strength that rose and deepened when he commanded it to.  
  
“ _Now_ ,” he said, voice so deep that he scarcely recognized it himself, and couldn’t have blamed anyone else for running away. He stretched his hands out to the sides, and Draco was there next to him, leaning against him to keep the winds from sweeping them apart. Draco’s eyes burned, although Harry couldn’t know, now, if he realized that from the bond or from turning his head to see.  
  
He nodded to Draco and gestured again, and his winds sprang up,  _his_ winds, the ones drawn from the transformed power inside him, not the ones stolen from Hurricane’s skies or Bodiless’s control.  
  
Draco had accused him of letting his wand magic fall away and embracing only his wild magic. What he didn’t seem to remember was that everyone else had wand magic in addition to wild magic. Harry’s inborn strength hadn’t simply abandoned him; it had transformed.  
  
And he could prove it now.  
  
He slammed his magic down around him and Draco in one ring, and encompassed the rest of the camp in the other, the sleeping Teddy and the silver house where Andromeda still sat and the fire around which the rest of them had gathered, solid walls of wind, pressure going the opposite way from the storm’s, holding strong and steady and forbidding the hurricane that wanted to hammer them to tumble or topple them. Harry drove his hands down like pistons, and felt the wind dig beneath the surface of the earth. He willed it not to lift the grass and disturb the patterns of the soil, and it did not. What he willed, happened.  
  
He stared into the sky, into the motionless, lidless eye of their enemy, and waited.  
  
Silence, breathless and distant. Harry heard his own breathing, and that of Draco, so close beside him that his warmth leaked into Harry’s side and inundated his bones. Harry rested his head on his shoulder for a moment. He still gripped his magic in tight, shaking hands that held the air still like the reins on Swoop’s neck, but he had to rest for a second.  
  
It was only a second.  
  
The winds came for them again, and Harry felt them on his hair before he strengthened his barriers both above and below. He could hear someone crying out in fear, although he couldn't turn his head and look to see who it was. He could only push more strength in their direction, and hope that would be enough.  
  
Draco’s hand closed on his elbow.  _How much longer can you keep this up?_ he whispered down the bond.  
  
 _I don’t know,_ Harry answered.  _How much longer is the battle going to last?_  
  
Since that was something no one could answer, they stood there, waiting.  
  
Then the magic came again. And this time, Harry knew within a breath of the wind’s touching his circling walls that he wasn’t going to be able to resist it.  
  
He also knew that he would try his best, because there were people here who would die otherwise, and for nothing except the extraordinary, stupid fury of Bodiless. So he threw his will into it, calling up winds from himself, that manifested from his fingers and lifted the fringe from his forehead as they exited by way of his scar, that made his whole body tremble from the way they jolted him.  
  
They were coming, and they were—  
  
Up against a greater force. Harry hadn’t forgotten the way that Bodiless had treated him when he flew after Draco, the way it had flung him at the ground and pinned Draco helplessly, the way it had called and given them no choice but to come. He was going to lose, because there was nothing but pure power here.  
  
He turned and flung himself on top of Draco, wrapping his arms around him and perforce wrapping his winds at the same time. Draco yipped with surprise and struggled for a moment. That could have cost Harry his chance to save his bondmate’s life, but he clung stubbornly, and Draco hadn’t trained in physical combat the way Harry had, during the few short Auror lessons he’d ever had. They dropped heavily to the ground with Harry still on top, ducking his head gently down so that his forehead rested against Draco’s hair, and covered him completely.  
  
He would have shielded Teddy and the rest, he reached desperately out hoping he still could, but Draco was the one within reach, and the one that he had the power to give his life for, if he could guard him with his body in the face of that incredible magic, keep his bones from breaking in or soften his landing.  
  
He felt the shimmer of something vast moving over him, the touch on the back of his neck and his hair that was like stroking fingers. He heard Bodiless laughing in his ear. The bond thrummed around them, and Harry had no idea what would happen next. He concentrated on the bond, the thing that tied him and Draco together, and that had let them resist Bodiless the last time they confronted it.  
  
Draco clasped him back, and when the winds picked up and flung them through endless space, at least they went together.  
  
*  
  
Draco could feel that voice in the back of his head more than he could hear it, the voice that called him endlessly and sternly as it demanded that he come, that he surrender, that he be Bodiless’s servant because only that way would he have the freedom and the power that he had dreamed of. He could feel his own subservience, the things in him that had made him a Death Eater, and the things that had made him vow to be free after that, and the cowardice that might prevent him from keeping a promise to himself.   
  
He could feel the bond, too, and the way that Harry wrapped it around them the way he wrapped his arms, and the way that Draco loved him and hated him and longed for him because of that.  
  
They didn’t land. They flew on through howling darkness. Draco thought of the first night he had been on Hurricane, when the storm had snatched him from his unprepared position and used him this way. He wondered where they might land. He wondered what would become of them.  
  
He heard a great sound beneath them, cries and squeals. Draco didn’t know how to turn his head to look. He had forgotten which way was down, even as the noises made it clear. He had forgotten how to move in other ways than forwards, or whichever direction the wind was pulling them now.  
  
He had forgotten, but Harry hadn’t.  
  
Draco felt them turn, pivot, lunge. He didn’t know where they were going. He held, and when Harry asked him, in words that seemed to tumble through his head like falling books, to call his wild magic to his hands and extend his claws, he did it without asking whether or not he should. This was Harry who was asking, his bonded. Of course he was going to do it.  
  
They landed on something yielding, and Harry unrolled from him and stood up. His head was lifted, and Draco saw the expression on his face. He wanted to slap it off. Couldn’t Harry be afraid of  _anything_ like a normal person, just for once?  
  
 _I’m glad that you’re conscious and not caught up in that trap Bodiless tried to set for us,_ Harry said dryly.  _Now that you’re back to normal, could you reach up and cut the chains that it’s used?_  
  
It took long moments for Draco to realize that there were no mummidade on the ground around them, which there should have been. He tilted his head back, eyes striving with darkness that was clouds and wind and magic, and Bodiless stretched out and lying above them, making everything murky with the way it thrummed.   
  
The mummidade were above them.  
  
A tendril of dark magic was thrust through every single one of their bellies. They dangled in silence, although Draco knew they had been crying out before, in silence,  _apart_ from each other. Bodiless had found a way to defeat them that didn’t depend on killing them all.  
  
Draco glanced at the spears that went through their bodies, and then shook his head and swept his claws at the black tendrils that sprang up from the ground.  
  
The first ones, he cut easily; it felt like thin stalks that turned into smoke when brushed by his own wild magic. Then he ran into something that felt like a steel wall, and shook his head, a little dazed.  
  
Meanwhile, the call sprang up in the back of his mind again.  
  
Harry spoke through the bond, whispering tales of the times they’d lain together in the grass over the dreams that Bodiless presented of Draco being all-powerful—under it, of course. This time, even though the winds had brought them all the way to the north and they were much closer to Bodiless, Draco found that he could ignore the voice much more easily than before. He simply cut and severed and cut again, and the stalks quivered and were gone.  
  
Westshadow trotted towards them. At least, Draco thought it was Westshadow, although it was hard to tell in the faint light that was coming through the clouds, because they hadn’t met any other mummidade who used four bodies so far.  
  
This time, two of the bodies came to Harry and Draco, while the other two locked their horns and lowered their heads. Draco’s teeth almost cracked when a bond sprang up between them. It was like the one the mummidade had forged with Open Wings and Swoop, in the same way wine was like water. Rougher around the edges, with the words blazing into his head. He had the impression that the two mummidade with him and Harry were forcing themselves to understand Harry and Draco, and channeling that impression back to the other two bodies, who themselves came up with a message and sent it back to the two bodies near Harry and Draco for translation.  
  
 _We must all bond,_ Westshadow said.  _We tried to do this when we thought we were the only ones on Hurricane._  
  
 _The only ones?_ Harry asked, before Draco could.  
  
 _The only ones who—_  
  
There was a blast of imagery there, but from the way it showed mummidade intelligently leaping to the sides to avoid the birds, Draco thought he knew what they meant. The mummidade had thought they were the only species on Hurricane who could think. Now that they knew they weren’t, they were at a loss as to how to save the planet from Bodiless themselves.  
  
 _We must bring them in,_ said Westshadow, and flexed all its heads at angles so impossible that watching them made Draco a little sick, and he had to look away.  _We must bond them, the riders and the humans and the mummidade who are not here._  
  
Draco opened his mouth to ask about the mummidade who were here, but ended up closing it again. If it were possible for mummidade to bond across vast distances, he thought they would have done it already. They seemed to require physical contact between the bodies.  
  
Besides, the populations of riders and humans were smaller anyway.  
  
 _How can we help when the other ones haven’t come with us?_ Harry asked, his fingers digging into the shaggy white curls above the golden eyes of the mummid that stood beside him.  
  
That mummid tilted its head back, and Draco could read the answer in the golden eyes, or so he thought, before Westshadow’s voice hissed to life in his head.  _We use you as the anchors and the focal points. The others will use you as the gate.  
  
_ Draco shuddered, and not because of the images that the words stirred up in him.  _The others will be able to use our bond?_  
  
 _They can reach through it,_ was what Westshadow said, and then it turned its heads up and behind them. The winds were descending again, Draco thought. Bodiless had given up on calling them in their minds, knowing now they would never respond, and had decided to hammer them until they gave up.  _Will you let them?_  
  
Draco nodded. There was no answer but to nod, not when he could feel the glow already springing up in Harry’s half of the bond. Of course they had to let others in, had to give them the thing that Draco had hoped to cherish for himself. There was no way to hold back, no way to have anything private in the face of Harry’s great love for his friends.  
  
 _I love you, too._  
  
Draco smiled wanly at him, and wondered how in the world he could agree, or disagree, or turn his back on Harry, or make himself clear at all, if the bond hadn’t already made his reluctance and his understanding both clear.  
  
Harry squeezed his hand, and said,  _Don’t worry about it. They’re going to reach through us, and then I’ll exile them from the bond again._  
  
Draco felt a confused, blurring moment pass through his mind, during which he seemed to be complaining about the fact that other people would use their bond to Harry, and Harry was reassuring him with more grace and swiftness than Draco had thought possible. Then Harry turned around to Westshadow and nodded slightly. “We’re ready.”  
  
 _I’m not,_ Draco would have said, but Westshadow moved in, and the alien presence in his mind, more alien even than the bond already established between them, shut him up.  
  
Westshadow swept across them like a cloud across the sun, like a fall of snow, and settled somewhere behind and beyond them. Draco shivered. He could feel a touch on something that felt like a harpstring, a string of blood, and reckoned they were touching Teddy and Andromeda through him, through the biological link they shared. He derived some faint amusement from the revulsion the mummidade had showed when they told them about coming from the bellies and wombs of other humans. They had no choice at the moment but to face their disgust.  
  
Then other voices were in his mind, other consciousnesses. He could feel the pointed, slimy boulder that was Andromeda’s resistance, and the way she fought, and the quiet, spreading pool of wonder that marked Teddy.  
  
Then Weasley and Granger were there, too, through the bonds of friendship that Harry shared with them: Weasley red and loud as pepper, Granger calm and pale like a silvery oval. And after them came the other Weasleys, pulled in by Weasley’s blood bond, and the werewolf’s wife, connected to him through the blood of their child, and the jokester's girlfriend, bound by love. There was even a flash of claws and feathers that made Draco think of Ginny’s bird, connected to her with a different sort of bond.  
  
It was a confused, crowding, jostling sensation. Draco would have liked to back out of it, but he had the feeling that no one else knew how to control their reactions, either. They shifted and yelled in the confines of his mind and Harry’s, and then Westshadow turned them around and pointed them.  
  
Draco opened his eyes and looked up into the storm, using his physical eyes as a distraction from the mental chaos. He started. Overhead hung a perfect line of riders and beasts, their wings beating strongly as they faced down the wind that Bodiless flung at them. In the center of them was Open Wings, his eyes shut and his claws extended. Draco could almost see silvery sparks, with the sharpness of lightning, dripping off the end of them. He wondered how horrible and distracting this was for  _him_ , but suspected he would never know. Open Wings would hardly share an experience like that with them.  
  
There was more chaos, and more noise. Then Westshadow stamped with all sixteen hooves at once, leaping in the air and coming down again, and Draco heard it as the beat of a drum. A rhythm began to throb through the multiple bonds, steady as a heartbeat, directing their movements.  
  
Draco couldn’t name the  _kind_ of movements. Not flight, not battle, not dancing, not walking, not reaching, but all of those. Andromeda rolled her slime-covered boulder downhill to its beat, and Harry opened his mouth and warbled forth a song of despair and pain and wind, and Granger mapped out strong and weak points in Bodiless’s attack, and Open Wings spoke words in the riders’ language that Draco understood as long as the bond lasted, words that gave him the hatching of eggs and the breaking into the world of new things, still covered with damp, downy feathers.  
  
It flowed back and forth, and Draco had almost got used to it when the rhythm skirled up and assumed a different pace. Draco tilted his head back and opened his eyes again, distantly aware of the way that Harry squeezed his hand, and saw Bodiless overhead.  
  
Bodiless, the Darkness in the North, the most terrifying bloody thing he had ever faced—at that moment, it was all and none of those, and Draco heard himself screaming shrilly. He could hear complaints from the people in his head, the ones who weren’t here physically and wanted to know what was happening from their position in the camp. He ignored them. He focused on the rhythm instead, and the battle that raged back and forth.  
  
They were fighting. Draco knew that, because he could feel the winds pressing against his body, and knew that Bodiless was trying to destroy them. But he didn’t know what came after that, what he was doing exactly, the best way to categorize what he was doing.  
  
 _Trying to defend ourselves will do nicely._  
  
That was Harry, and with him as an anchor to tie him down, Draco finally managed to avoid the impression that he was whirling off into nothingness. He knew where to go, and he could find a name for what he was doing, based on the wild magic that guided his fingers more than anything else.  
  
 _Cutting._  
  
He cut and stabbed and punched at the tendrils of Bodiless that came down towards him and tried to spear him, to drag him apart from Harry, to impale his body in the same way it had impaled the bodies of the mummidade. Bodiless snarled in his ear, and once gave a fragment of the call that had so tempted Draco before, but at the moment, it was nothing but a torn scrap of sound struggling against the chaos.   
  
The winds changed, and Draco felt Harry pressed close to his side, staring up at the mass of blackness overhead and snarling with the same defiance that drove Draco. That was comforting, more than comforting, to know that he wasn’t alone. Draco leaned into Harry and snarled in tune, and Bodiless screamed and pulled back.  
  
It was being crushed by Andromeda’s boulder, dissolving in the clear and curious light of Teddy’s eyes. It was poisoned by the way Weasley carried himself, hot and peppery, and mapped and chained by Granger’s knowledge. The werewolf charged and howled and bit, and his wife danced and charmed the parts of Bodiless that tried to gain hold of her mind, making them slip away. Their daughter was a low and soft silver throb, not fully-formed as yet, but asserting her potential to  _be_ in spite of all the ways Bodiless would constrain her.  
  
The Weasley patriarch was a stronger anchor than Draco had known he could be, stabbing roots deep into the ground. Bodiless didn’t know how to deal with a tree when there were so few on Hurricane, and those that were were different. His wife whispered and hissed in his branches, a wind of her own devising.  
  
And fainter and further in his mind, as though they were standing farther away, came the sound of wings and wind in wings, and a hot roar like dragonfire pouring through a narrow channel, and a firework that took off in constant crashes and cracks and sparkles trailing a sense of fun behind it, and a calm, balanced presence that spread like Healing salve, and a stick in the mud that, swayed, turned to stone.  
  
 _Ginny. Charlie. George. Angelina. Percy._  
  
The names weren’t Draco’s idea; Harry was the one who thought them and poured those names through him at the same time, so that Draco had no choice but to accept them and then use them as part of the bond, part of the battle. But he intended to stop referring to the Weasels by those names as soon as he could and use something else, always assuming that Harry would allow him to.  
  
 _Assuming that any of us survive this battle._  
  
In the howling storm of magic, Draco squeezed Harry’s hand and flung himself back into the fight. Harry was with him, still whirling and dancing in the middle of his wind, and backing Draco’s claws up whenever he could spare the force.  
  
Bodiless was there above them, crushing and flowing power, more of it than Draco had ever known existed, enough to stir some molten longing up in the back of his throat. But there was no way that he could give in to it, he reminded himself. Bodiless wouldn’t share.  
  
Draco required that things like that be shared.  
  
The realization struck and sparked in him with a shock. Before, he had dreamed of having the power all to himself, enough that he would never need to be a slave again, and could demand anything he wanted. But now, with the way that Harry leaned into the bond and the way the others howled around him, stacking up their strength against Bodiless, enduring the repeated assaults, wearing Bodiless down with sheer existence, he couldn’t imagine having it to himself any longer.  
  
 _Not that I want to share it with everyone,_ he told Harry.  _Just you._  
  
Harry laughed, a wild sound, and he sang and Draco cut and Andromeda rolled and Teddy gazed and Ron heated and Hermione chained and Bill howled and Fleur danced and Victoire pulsed and Arthur stood and Molly wound and Ginny flew and Charlie roared and George sparked and Angelina healed and Percy stood, and the mummidade flowed around them leaping and jumping, and the riders hovered and contributed.  
  
And—  
  
And above them, the darkness suddenly tattered, blew apart, frayed, became nothingness.  
  
Passed like a storm.  
  
Draco gasped, and lifted his head to gape at the sunlight.


	31. Settlements

"I can't believe defeating Bodiless was as simple as that."  
  
Harry opened one eye. He still felt like a rag that someone had picked up and wrung out to dry, and had to work hard to get a little spit into his mouth. At least the bed beneath him was soft, the piled grass and moss of the meadow. "Speak--for yourself.  _Simple?_ Fucking _simple_ was it?  _Now_ he says it." He grunted and shut his eyes again.  
  
"Well, I mean, we didn't have to go through even as many strategies as I would to win a chess game." Ron leaned forwards from his chair beside Harry's bed. Harry knew that because he could hear the wood, Transfigured from a boulder, creaking, but he refused to open his eyes and give Ron the satisfaction of  _looking_. "I didn't think defeating Bodiless would be that simple, really."  
  
"Speak for yourself," Harry said again. "You're also not the one who had other people reaching through his bond and humming in the back of his head and winding and doing Merlin knows what else to tie all of you together."  
  
"That's true," Ron said, but in such an unabashed tone that Harry gave up on convincing him. "But I don't really understand why you're so tired, mate. Malfoy's not that tired, and he worked as hard as you did."  
  
Harry smiled in spite of himself. Maybe Ron couldn't call Draco by his first name yet, but referring to him that way, without malice in his voice, was a good first step. "It has something to do with the magic I spent before that, trying to keep the camp safe from the winds that Bodiless was stirring up," he said sleepily. "Or that's what Open Wings is saying, through the mummidade."  
  
"That's going to be strange, damn, living with magical creatures who are every bit as important and impatient as us," Ron muttered. Harry knew he was shaking his head, although he didn't open his eyes to see.  
  
"It will be," Harry said. "But we'll get used to it, because we don't have a lot of choice." And he hoped, although he wouldn't say it, that relationships with the riders and the mummidade would give everyone else something to focus on than tension between the humans.  
  
Ron touched his shoulder. "I reckon I ought to leave you to get some sleep," he said. "And--be proud, mate. You helped save us all, again."  
  
" _Helped_ ," Harry repeated, and reached out, catching hold of Ron's hand and looking at him squarely, because this was important. "That's the important thing. The most important thing. All the rest of you were there. And because of that, the riders and the mummidade are willing to let us live in the meadow." He suspected their attitude would be much different towards humans who hadn't borne part of the cost of defending them.  
  
Ron grinned back at him. "I always regretted that we couldn't help you more when you faced Voldemort," he whispered, glancing over his shoulder as though there was anyone else in the tent to flinch at the name. "But the last time pays for everything, right?"  
  
"It should," Harry said. "If it's the last time, it means that I won't have to do any more world-saving, ever again. And that sounds fucking  _nice,_ let me tell you."  
  
Ron laughed at him, and left. Harry listened to his footsteps striding across the ground outside for only a few minutes before he fell asleep.  
  
Sometime before the morning, someone crawled into bed beside him and looped a ticklish arm over his ribs, but Harry knew exactly who it was, and only grunted at him before he went back to sleep.  
  
*  
  
Draco had to admit that life in the meadow was better than life in the camp beside the pool, and they'd only been here a few days. Well,  _properly_ here a few days, if you didn't count their first hostile encounter with the riders and the times they had soared over it on Harry's winds.  
  
The green of the grass warmed and soothed Draco's eyes. He hadn't realized he missed Earth's colors so much. The grass was still not Earth grass, and the creatures that ate it had more differences from the animals of Draco's home planet the longer he stared, but looking out over it in the misty morning as he sprawled on the bed beside Harry, the differences wavered and blurred into distance.  
  
The riders had fetched the Weasleys, Granger, and even Andromeda and Teddy from the camp with their beasts. It was the fastest way anyone could come with Harry still sleeping off his magical exhaustion, unless they were willing to pass through the silver oval. And not even Granger had wanted to, although she had seen Harry and Draco walk into one and come out alive.  
  
The riders helped them pile up their beds, and gave them tents woven from billowing leather that Draco suspected came from the hides of their beasts. The riders didn't venture outside the meadow very often, Open Wings told Draco through the bond with the mummidade, but when they did, they preferred to sleep in a shelter rather than on the ground as their beasts rested. And Andromeda had begun to make houses, although so far there were only three--one for her and Teddy, one for Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, one for the werewolf and his wife and child. Draco saw his aunt standing in the middle of the meadow often, staring around with tear-blurred eyes.  
  
 _Still trying to come to terms with her wild magic and the fact that she'll never see Earth again,_ Draco thought, and avoided her. He had little desire to speak with her without Harry between them to use as a buffer, anyway. Harry saw more good qualities in her than Draco ever would.  
  
Teddy and the werewolf's daughter loved the meadow. They raced in laughing circles, and stared up with open mouths when gentle rain fell from the sky, and if they had been negatively affected by their part in the battle against Bodiless, there was no physical sign of it. Teddy did hate it when Draco gave him a bath, but Draco knew from speaking with Harry that the kicking and screaming was normal.  
  
Ginny's bird apparently had given the riders' beasts some trouble. Open Wings had to speak sharply to keep Swoop from attacking it, and wherever it flew in the first days in the meadow--still not far from the ground, testing its wings--beasts circled above it, and aimed their paws at its neck. But the beasts were either more intelligent than Draco had thought or they picked up on their riders' acceptance of the creature, because soon they ignored it, other than a flip of their tails and flex of their claws when it first took off.  
  
Draco helped with the transfer of Granger's precious greenhouses from the south to the north, since it seemed she trusted only him to get the spells right that secured the earth around the plants' roots and the panes of glass in between the great struts that formed the greenhouse walls themselves. Draco shrugged when he realized that trust and took the work. He was glad to get it.  
  
It kept his mind off Harry and how still he lay in his bed.  
  
No one could tell Draco why Harry had been affected more by the battle than all the rest of them. They had all been there, in the bond, and the mummidade had been the ones who made the connection across the distance possible, but none of them had collapsed like Harry had. Draco had held the bond open along with him, and he had only slept a day and then awakened with a pounding headache.  
  
Harry slept on and on.  
  
Draco stood in the middle of the meadow one morning and looked up to watch the riders sweeping past overhead. They continued to keep a watch on the skies, Open Wings had explained, because they couldn’t quite believe that Bodiless was gone. They had lived under the shadow of its threat so long, and now, within days of deciding to ally with the mummidade and the humans, it had supposedly vanished. Draco could appreciate the logic even as it gave him a sharp shiver in the middle of his heart, to know that people who had lived on Hurricane far longer than they had still doubted.  
  
 _People_.  
  
Draco turned the thought over in his head, and then nodded slowly. Yes, he had come to think of the riders as people, helped by their general human outline. He knew it would take longer for their beasts and the mummidade, because they resembled animals more. But he would get there in the end. The mummidade were still the only ones who could bond everyone sufficiently to let them exchange words. They would have to accept that human-like brains dwelt within them in the end.  
  
“Draco!”  
  
Draco turned swiftly, thinking for a moment it was Teddy who had called his name, and then realized the voice was too clear, and too loud, and came from too high up. He blinked and focused on Granger’s face. She was racing towards him, and ignoring the turning heads, as well as the tightening wings overhead. There was still a certain instinct among the beasts to chase things that ran.  
  
“What?” Draco asked, taking a step towards her in a motion that he hoped would prevent the beasts from diving.  
  
“Harry’s awake.”  
  
Draco had the impression that Granger was trying to say something else, something that blurred because of the impatient tightness in her throat and her harsh breathing, but he couldn’t stay for it. He began to run instead, and Granger came right behind him, clucking and trying to say whatever message she hadn’t delivered.  
  
But Draco didn’t care. Harry was  _awake_ , and when he reached out, he discovered the soft throb of Harry’s emotions. He had almost given up on looking, which was why he hadn’t been the first one to learn he’d woken, the way he should have been.  
  
But they were still alive, in a safer place now. Surely he would have the time to learn.  
  
*  
  
Harry put a hand to his head and then stretched his hands out in front of him. There was still an unfamiliar feeling of  _largeness_ to the way he moved, he thought, as though he had fingers he couldn’t see and limbs that extended beyond the ones that he had grown so far. He shook his head in wonder.   
  
He didn’t know what had happened. But if this was the sole consequence of defeating Bodiless and fighting a battle as hard as the one he’d fought, then he’d take it.  
  
“Harry.”  
  
The world around him seemed to explode in white and gold light. Harry rose to his feet, staring. Draco was in the doorway of the tent, and looking at him with eyes like the sun.   
  
Harry barely had time to spread his arms before Draco flung himself into them. Harry closed his eyes and cradled him close, murmuring into his ear. It seemed that Draco had been more affected by the time he spent asleep than Harry had been, even though he had these strange feelings. Draco’s breath came harder than it should have, even if he had run all the way across the meadow, and his grip made Harry’s ribs hurt.  
  
“I thought you might be dead,” Draco whispered. “I thought you were never waking up. Everyone else seemed to recover, but you didn’t. Why is that?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Harry whispered back, and cradled Draco as close as he could, stroking Draco’s sides up and down. “But I’m free now.” He hesitated, then sent the sensation of having an extra side to his arms down the bond to Draco. Maybe Draco would know what it was, or at least how to deal with it.  
  
Draco reared his head back at once and felt along Harry’s arms, peering him in the face. “You don’t feel as though you’re knocking anything down when you move?” he asked. “Or heavier than normal?”  
  
“Only in some parts of my body,” Harry admitted. “And no, I’m not actually making anything fall the way I would be if something was  _really_ there.”  
  
“I was trying to tell you,” Hermione said from behind Draco in an injured voice.  
  
Harry nodded and paid attention to her, ignoring the way Draco shifted beside him. Draco probably wished they were alone, but they would have some time like that soon enough. Right now, if Hermione knew what was going on, Harry wanted to hear it so he could get rid of this sensation.  
  
“Ron noticed that he wasn’t able to make the winds stay away from you anymore, when he was sitting with you,” Hermione said. “And he always had been able to before. He kept the winds from disturbing you when you wouldn’t wake up. His magic to banish magic was strong enough for that.  
  
“This last day, he couldn’t.” Hermione hesitated, then pushed ahead. “I think—I think the magic of Bodiless had to go somewhere when it was destroyed, Harry, and it went to you, maybe because you’re the one who’s had the wild magic longest.”  
  
Harry frowned and shook his head. “I think I would have noticed if I could do more powerful magic,” he said, and held up a hand. A wind whistled down to him and around his head, but when he glanced at Draco, he smiled. Draco’s eyebrows had risen, and the bond between them trembled like clear water. “See? I can’t really call winds that are stronger than before. It must be something else.”  
  
“Try to sense other magic,” Hermione said.  
  
Harry tried, as much as he could  _try_ something when he had no idea what it would really imply or where he would probably have no idea if he succeeded, and shook his head a second later. “I don’t sense anything that’s different from what I felt before,” he admitted. “I know Draco is here, but he’s the only one I can feel.”  
  
Hermione rapped her fingernail against her teeth, making Draco wince. Harry sent him a mental squeeze of the hand. He didn’t really like the sound, either, but he knew better than to disturb Hermione when she was on the track of a thought.  
  
“Try something else, then,” Hermione said. “Look—Malfoy, Draco, why don’t you call your claws and hold them out?”  
  
With a long, slow raising of his eyebrow that said clearly he was only doing this because Harry wanted to know about the strange sensations, Draco called his claws. Harry could feel him doing it through the bond.  
  
And then Draco swore, and long cuts appeared in the side of the tent opposite them. Draco pulled his hands back and stared at them. Hermione was nodding, and her eyes were bright and wide and knowing.  
  
“I didn’t grow them that long,” Draco murmured, turning his hands over. Harry could feel the way his heart was bounding, much harder than he was showing Hermione right now, but he didn’t look up or around, only reached along the bond to Harry for comfort. “I wouldn’t have wanted to cut the tent. What happened?”  
  
Hermione took a deep breath. “Bodiless had power of its own, but I think it was also a repository of power. I’ve been feeling and mapping out the wild magic, and the valley you told me about was always the source of the strongest power I could feel—the direction you flew when Bodiless pulled on Draco. But now it’s gone. There’s no reason for that, unless the power went somewhere else.” She turned on her heel and stared directly at Harry.  
  
“So, what?” Harry asked, and stared at his own hands the way Draco was looking at  _his_. “I make other people more powerful?”  
  
Hermione nodded rapidly. “I think the wild magic needs someone who can connect other people to it. Bodiless was probably that at first. Maybe the mummidade and the riders and the others, whatever other creatures there might be on Hurricane, even came to life because of Bodiless at first. It’s the source of the winds, you remember saying that, Harry? The place they blow from.”  
  
“So when it died,” Draco began.  
  
“Its own power died with it, but the gate it opens,” Harry continued.  
  
“Opens through Harry now,” Draco finished, and stared at Harry in the way that Harry would have liked to stare at his own face in a mirror.  
  
“Yes,” Hermione said. “I think that’s what you’re feeling, Harry. That extra heaviness is the extra power, a new dimension that your own magic opens through.”  
  
Harry sat down on his bed. Draco sat beside him, and put a hand on his arm, asking without words if he was all right.  
  
Harry nodded in response, and faced Hermione. “All right. All  _right._ And this means—what? That the others have to be near me to use their powers now?”  
  
Hermione shook her head. “I don’t think so. Ron was having trouble using his gift near you at all, and Andromeda’s built houses away from you, and I can map the wild magic in whatever direction I want to. But I think you do make us stronger, and maybe this meadow is going to become the source of the winds now.”  
  
Harry swallowed. “Right,” he said. “So long as I don’t have to save the world again, then I think I can put up with this.”  
  
“We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.” Hermione’s eyes were kind, kinder than Harry could remember them being since they were eleven. “It might be that you will have to save the world, if only by strengthening our magic to hold back a threat.”  
  
Harry grunted. His mind was spinning with images of Bodiless, as much as it was possible to have those, and images of the ocean, and the mummidade, and the riders. What the fuck would happen next? Would he have to go to other places, to be responsible for people he had never met, to keep the magic flowing?  
  
 _I don’t see why,_ Draco said, his voice as deep and cool as the ocean Harry had been picturing.  _Bodiless could stay in one place and still influence what it wanted to. Maybe there’s more than one reason that your wild magic is in the wind. You can reach out and touch distant places without moving from your own home._  
  
Harry took a deep breath, and then nodded. He hated the thought of being restricted in any way. The battle with Bodiless was the last one he ever wanted to fight like that. He was twenty-one, and he had already fought one Dark Lord determined to destroy the world and one dark thing—that was the only word he could come up with for Bodiless—determined to destroy their little settlement on Hurricane. Maybe now, he could ignore the new problem that Bodiless had saddled him with and continue with a normal life.  
  
 _That is the best way to look at it,_ Draco said in the back of his head, warm and soft and supportive.  
  
So, when Hermione began to say something about how they needed to spend time thinking about what Harry could do now and studying the way the winds spread around Hurricane, Harry held up his hand and said, “Not right now. I just woke up from a coma, and I haven’t had time to celebrate being alive yet. Can’t it wait, Hermione?”  
  
She paused and stared at him, and then her eyes softened as she nodded. “Of course it can. I’m sorry, Harry. I’m being thoughtless. But I wanted to make sure that you understood what I thought was happening.”  
  
“You always need to make sure someone understands,” Draco muttered. “It’s the thing I like least about you.”  
  
Harry nudged him in the ribs and continued speaking to Hermione so she wouldn’t feel compelled to take notice of Draco’s words. “Thanks. Let’s go out and enjoy our home, shall we?”  
  
Draco took his hand and dragged him out through the tent flap, probably so that Hermione wouldn’t have a chance to say something else. Harry laughed and went with him. He was looking forward to seeing Teddy again, and Ron, and the others who had been in the back of his head during the battle, and even Andromeda.  
  
 _And maybe we can have some time, together,_ Draco said slyly.  
  
Harry bent towards him to kiss the back of his neck.  _Absolutely_.  
  
*  
  
Draco rolled away from Harry and smiled sleepily into the night sky. That had been the best lovemaking session they’d had in a while.  
  
 _Being in a coma does something for my libido, apparently,_ Harry said.  
  
Draco hit him in the stomach and leaned his head on Harry’s shoulder, watching the stars. They were still unfamiliar, but now Draco could imagine how they would grow slowly more and more familiar as the years passed. And the patterns of Hurricane’s three moons would grow to mean more to him than the waxing and waning of Earth’s moon.  
  
“We really are here to live and die,” he whispered to Harry, aloud, because he wanted to feel the vibrations of the words on his lips and tongue and feel through the bond what they did to Harry.  
  
“We are,” Harry whispered back, and then turned his head sharply to the south, his nostrils flaring. Draco looked in that direction, but saw nothing except the winged guard of the riders and their beasts circling. The mummidade were glowing shapes grazing in the grass nearby.  
  
“What?” Draco asked quietly. “Do you sense something else dangerous to the south?”  
  
“Not dangerous,” Harry said, closing his eyes. “ _Different._ The winds—I’m starting to realize that they react differently when they meet a species that can think. They get excited and move faster when they’re near the mummidade, and they  _want_ to help the riders fly. Maybe that’s just happening because I like the mummidade and the riders, and they’re blowing through me, now. I don’t know.”  
  
“What can you feel to the south?” Draco asked, taking his hand. “More groups of humans?” For once, he was getting no more information through the bond than he would by asking the questions aloud. Harry’s mind was a swirling, confused cloud.  
  
“Yes,” Harry whispered. “I can feel—I think I can feel Primrose.” He opened his eyes and smiled. “I’m glad she survived after all.”  
  
“But there’s more than that,” Draco persisted. He knew that the shadow in the back of Harry’s eyes had another source. “What is it?”  
  
“I can feel something else intelligent,” Harry said quietly. “Not birds. But something else, something that can think and fly. The winds tell me about their weight in the sky.” He hesitated. “And I think they’ve allied with the humans. Primrose is close to a large group of them.”  
  
Draco squeezed his hand, and said nothing. As far as he was concerned, those people, or creatures, in the south, were of no concern until they came north. And they were well-protected here.   
  
 _We can wait until they come,_ he whispered to Harry.  
  
Harry turned and kissed him, and they settled back into the grass, the winds swirling around them and stirring the greenery into soft ripples, shadowed by the wings of the riders, the mummidade glowing among it like earthbound moons.  
  
Draco thought of the dance that the mummidade might teach them, of the child that they might hold in their arms soon, and watch toddling through the green grass.  
  
And then he paid attention, instead, to the dance that was being danced right now, under the stars, upon the earth.  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
